‘Life or death consequences’: Families fear rollback of school vaccination requirements under RFK Jr
A The political battle over school-based Covid protocols in early 2021 quickly became personal for a Colorado family whose son’s cystic fibrosis — a life-threatening genetic disease that attacks the lungs and other vital organs — left him susceptible to complications from virus.
Kate Gould said the classroom then became a dangerous place for her son hardline conservatives took over the Douglas County school board and the district removed masking requirements.
After lengthy back-and-forth discussions involving a pulmonologist and a special education advocate, district leaders ultimately agreed to an accommodation for his classroom that would require masks. But just weeks later, the superintendent was fired and, under new leadership, the district again removed the masking accommodation without consulting doctors or Gould, she told the 74 in a recent interview.
Nearly four years later, Gould and her family are living in Southern California — where they moved during the pandemic due to mask and vaccine requirements at the time — and she and other parents, advocates and health experts are gearing up for what the future could be . next front of the school culture wars: a broader attack on school vaccine mandates by the new Trump administration.
Currently, all 50 states have vaccination requirements for children attending child care and schools. But with Robert F Kennedy Jr. – who has peddled unfounded conspiracy theories and ever said: “There is no vaccine that is safe and effective” – possibly at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services, advocates and parents are right to fear a rollback in requirements, enforcement and funding, according to interviews with a dozen experts.
“The anti-vax warriors have made it inside the castle walls,” said Richard Hughes, a law professor at George Washington University who teaches a course on vaccine law.
Kennedy’s credentials and the various levers he could pull, experts told the 74, could have a huge impact on vaccination rates and the spread of preventable, contagious diseases among school-age children.
If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Kennedy would take control of an agency with a $1.7 trillion budget and 90,000 employees spread across 13 agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Dave Weldon, Donald Trump’s nominee to head the CDC, has also endorsed debunked theories: blaming vaccines for autism and some chronic diseases.
Kennedy, whose nomination faces strong opposition from health professionals and scientists at least one Republican senatordid not respond to requests for comment. He has said he will not take away vaccines, but will try to make more data on their safety and efficacy available.
“We don’t know what he’s going to do,” John Swartzberg, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Public Health, told the 74. “But if he tries to carry out the things he has publicly stated — not yet only recently, but for a long time – then the consequences for our children at school are terrible.”
While most school vaccine requirements come from states, the recommendations on which they are based start with federal agencies, such as the CDC, and enforcement is often left to local districts. This leaves room for both federal influence and “a mixed bag of enforcement,” said Northe Saunders, executive director of the pro-vaccine organization. Coalition for Safe Communitieswhich sees battles over school vaccination mandates playing out at the federal, state and school board levels.
Experts agreed that it is highly unlikely the federal government will try to pull vaccines from the market or categorically ban mandates, and most do not expect individual states to drop their long-standing requirements.
But James Hodge, a public health law expert at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, noted: “You don’t really have to get rid of the vaccine for people to stop taking it. You have to express doubts about it.”
That can happen by planting misinformation, he said, or by requiring vaccines to be reviewed differently for approval or federal funding. Any small decline in the number of parents vaccinating their children and attending schools or childcare could lead to disease outbreaks, an outcome Hodge said he expects to see in the coming year. Such declines are is already taking place.
The Coming School Board Wars
Even in Democratic-controlled California, Gould, the mother whose son has cystic fibrosis, said she worries about shifts in vaccine rhetoric, especially at the school board level.
“I think what I learned from my experience in Douglas County, Colorado, is that when these individuals take over majority control on school boards, it really affects everyone,” she said. “Despite the fact that we are a highly educated, very liberal coastal swathe of Southern California, there are certainly people trying to make inroads — and these are people who are anti-science.”
Parents across the country can apply for exemptions if their children cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. Most states also have religious exemptions, and 20 have some form of personal exemption religious exemptionsleaving a varied landscape.
School vaccination mandates have been around for a long time more than a centuryand while there has always been some pushback, it wasn’t until Covid that there was a real spike in vaccine hesitancy, said Kate King, chair of the National Association of School Nurses and a school nurse in Ohio.
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The source of skepticism has also changed. ASU’s Hodge said, “Rarely have we seen the federal government behind these debates in a way that this next administration could be.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, sees the potential “unraveling decades and generations of protective vaccines.”
Before a vaccine is approved, it must first go through an FDA advisory committee. Another committee at the CDC then develops recommendations for vaccination schedules, which state lawmakers rely on to determine their school policies. Kennedy would have a huge impact on who sits on these committees, and he could stack them with anti-vaccine advocates.
Kennedy could also request a review of all vaccines previously approved by the FDA and subject them to new requirements.
Many vaccines are paid for by the federal government. If Congress—under HHS leadership or on its own—were to raise that money, some of the most vulnerable children across the country could lose access to immunization. Trump has threatened to do so abolish schools make vaccinations mandatory for students.
“The moment you put a price tag on a vaccination – any price tag, even quite minimal – you see the vaccination rate drop,” says Hodge.
In addition to policy actions, experts warned about the power of rhetoric. The mere presence of a federal official who is skeptical — or downright hostile — to vaccines gives the opposition more credibility.
Because enforcement of these policies is typically left up to the school district, some advocates expect greater pressure on school board members to take anti-vaccine positions.
Hughes, a law professor at George Washington University, said he has already seen some groups use vaccines as a wedge issue, much like the debate over critical race theory – an academic framework used to examine systemic racism – that roiled school boards a few years ago.
In LouisianaAccording to a recent NPR investigation, public health workers were recently banned from advertising vaccinations against Covid, flu and MPox – formerly known as monkeypox. And a regional public health department in Idaho is no longer providing Covid vaccines to residents in six counties after a year narrow decision by its administration.
While the image of vaccine-skeptical parents is often one of young, white “crunchy moms,” Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, also pointed to “well-deserved” anxiety among Black and Latino parents.
Historically, she noted, significant harm has been done to Black communities by the weaponization of medical research, and families of color have had particularly negative experiences with the health care system — especially black mothers.
During the pandemic, Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine organization, seemed to capitalize on this distrust when the organization a video targeting Black Americans with debunked vaccine claims.
Using social media and other mechanisms, the anti-vax movement has also targeted fairly isolated groups in the United States with misinformation, Swartzberg noted. These include those of New York Orthodox Jewish community and the Somali community in Minnesota, where recent measles outbreaks have occurred in both cases.
Gould, the California mother, said that if she still lived in the more conservative Douglas County, she would worry that people would “believe the misinformation (and) stop vaccinating their children. This has enormous consequences for children with chronic illnesses – or, like my son, a life-threatening illness. It has life and death consequences.”
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This story was produced by The 74a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on education in the USA