While there are four-million-and-three things going horribly wrong at the national level, the world has not halted at the state level.
The West Virginia Legislature launches into its regular legislative session this week, but Gov. Patrick Morrisey is already on the move.
In one of his many executive orders, Morrisey attempted to stretch an existing West Virginia law — the Equal Protection for Religion Act of 2023 — to its illogical conclusion that it should grant a religious or sincerely-held-belief exemption to school-age vaccination requirements.
Our vaccination requirements are one of the few things West Virginia does right, and our leaders want to undo them.
West Virginia is one of only five states that offers only a medical exemption for the vaccines children are required to receive before entering public school: tetanus/diphtheria/pertussis (whooping cough), polio, measles/mumps/rubella, varicella (chickenpox), and hepatitis B and, before seventh grade, meningococcal/meningitis.
And that has made us one of the few states to avoid any notable outbreaks of childhood diseases. You may remember that polio reappeared in New York in 2022 in an unvaccinated young man who lived in an area with only a 60% polio-vaccination rate; he developed a severe case resulting in paralysis. In 2024, 10 people died from whooping cough: six under the age of 1, and four over the age of 1. Last year, the U.S. saw a worrying surge in measles cases — up to 285 from 59 in 2023 — with 89% of those cases among unvaccinated people (or those with unknown vaccination status). (West Virginia was one of 33 jurisdictions to report measles cases last year, but it was just one.) We’re only two months into 2025 and there are already 14 cases nationally.
Vaccines work: They effectively eradicated polio and measles in the U.S. for decades; whooping cough cases dropped precipitously after the DTP vaccine was introduced in the 1940s. Who knows someone under the age of 30 who has had chickenpox? Who last heard about a child born premature because a woman got measles while pregnant — or about birth defects caused by rubella during pregnancy? Who even knew that getting mumps after puberty could potentially affect a man’s fertility?
Unfortunately, it seems the sheer effectiveness of vaccines has become their downfall in the U.S.: Too many people have forgotten what it looks like to see a child suffer with chickenpox and be scarred for life, to see kids and adults alike in an iron lung or permanently deformed because of polio, or to see whooping cough or measles cause a child to develop fatal brain damage or breathing problems. But the rest of the world still knows: Measles killed 107,000 children in 2023 and whooping cough kills over 160,000 kids under age 5 annually.
Somewhere along the way, misconceptions and misinformation have undermined trust in scientifically proven, preventative vaccinations.
People started thinking that a vaccine is supposed to be a guarantee against getting sick — it’s not. Vaccines are designed to introduce a weakened or dead virus so your immune system learns how to fight it, therefore you won’t get severely sick if you do contract the illness.
And that means the full vaccine regimen — many vaccines, especially those for childhood diseases, require multiple shots and/or a booster shot. For example, an infant needs four doses of Tdap vaccine by the time they are 15 months old to have full protection from whooping cough. If a child doesn’t receive the full course of vaccines, they don’t get the full protection and they are left vulnerable to severe illness.
When enough people in a population get vaccinated against a specific disease, the community can achieve “herd immunity,” which is when enough people have protection against the disease that it stops spreading through the community. Some diseases have a lower threshold to reach herd immunity — polio, for example, only needs 80% vaccination rate — while more contagious diseases like measles require a 95% vaccination rate. When the vaccination rate in a community falls below that threshold, that’s when previously quashed diseases can start spreading again.
That is why it is so incredibly important for West Virginia to keep its high vaccination standards. We are not a healthy state on the whole: We have an older population and many people have at least one health condition. The old, the very young, and the immunocompromised are more likely to experience severe — even fatal — complications from illnesses from which the rest of us could easily recover.
Not everyone can be vaccinated — due to age or other medical conditions — which means those of us who can receive vaccines need to do so in order to protect the whole community.
Loosening vaccine requirements for school-age kids doesn’t honor religious beliefs or philosophical disagreements; it gives credence to misinformation and makes our state less safe and less healthy.
Make it clear to Gov. Morrisey and our legislators that rolling back the vaccination requirements rolls us back to a darker time in history. Do we really want to lose our children to preventable illnesses?
J. Nelson - Writer 