Patch Stats: Personal Belief Exemptions in Davis Joint Unified School District

Vaccines have been in the local news a lot lately, evoking a variety of strong opinions. 

We looked at the rate of children in Davis who started public kindergarten last year without the full battery of vaccinations because their parents or guardians signed affidavits stating that “all or some vaccinations are contrary to my personal beliefs.”

Personal Belief Exemptions are commonly signed out of fear that vaccines are dangerous for children or simply because guardians believe them to be unnatural.

While the PBE rate across Davis Joint Unified School District is 6 percent, Birch Lane Elementary has double that, coming in at 13 percent. That’s the highest among public schools in the district, according to the California Department of Public Health.

Most community members were not surprised that PBE rates in Davis came in higher than surrounding cities, but Birch Lane’s higher Personal Belief Exemption rate was less clear. That goes for parents as well as the school’s principal, Kathy Tyzzer.

“It’s new information to me,” Tyzzer said of Birch Lane. “I’m not surprised it would be higher in Davis, though.”

“I see both sides of the story,” said one Birch Lane student’s mother, who is a Registered Nurse. She preferred to remain anonymous. “It’s a parental choice. Vaccines are done too closely together, but they’re definitely needed.” 

It should be noted that the private Davis Waldorf School comes in at 34 percent, which is by far the highest in Davis.

Whooping Cough

This year, a state law requires students who are entering seventh through twelfth grades to show that they’ve received a vaccination for whooping cough. A study showing that whooping cough vaccines fade faster than public health officials thought supports the thinking behind the legislation.

Yolo County had 17 reported cases of whooping cough in 2010 and has had six so far this year. In California, the number spiked dramatically, from about 1,000 in 2009 to about 9,000 in 2010. The number of cases has decreased so far this year.

James Watt of the California Department of Public Health offered Patch some thoughts on Personal Belief Exemptions:

A community needs to maintain a 95 percent vaccination rate to keep the disease from spreading, he said. When there is an outbreak of those diseases, it’s usually children too small to be vaccinated and people with weak immune systems who get sick first.  

“If you are in a school with a high rate of personal belief exemptions, it may be necessary to pull your kids out (when there’s an outbreak),” Watt said.

He allowed that there are legitimate reasons some parents are skeptical about public health programs: Within living memory, the United States government infected prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis to test penicillin. For 40 years, public health officials in Alabama failed to treat black sharecroppers with syphilis as part of a longitudinal study investigating the venereal disease.

“Those kinds of things contribute to skepticism,” he said. “The important thing is to be as transparent as possible, to be science-based about the good, the bad and the ugly.  And when issues come out, to be frank and to investigate them vigorously.”

Davis Patch did not find any parents at Birch Lane who were open to discussing their reasons for a Personal Belief Exemption. That’s very understandable, considering the personal nature of the matter.

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