SIEGEL: Give us some examples of states that have exemptions from vaccinations for personal or philosophical beliefs that are on different ends of the spectrum of how easy it is to gain those exemptions. So one way of dealing with this is to have these rational exemption requirements - i.e., it should not be easier to get your child exempt compared to get them vaccinated. OMER: So for my perspective it's a soft policy option in a sense that it's a commonsense thing to have a policy where the balance of convenience is heavily in favor of vaccination because there is a lot of individual and societal interest in getting all children vaccinated because of individual inherit (ph) immunity. But you've written about states that allow for a parental choice, but also increase the rate of inoculation by the way that they implement the exemptions. We have far more people saying their children and people saying the other people's children should also be vaccinated. SIEGEL: Now, we have - on the one hand, we have some parents claiming I don't want my child to be vaccinated. ![]() ![]() Since then we haven't seen more up-to-date trend analysis, so it remains to be seen whether this rate has stabilized or have gone up. OMER: So what we have seen is that through 2011 there had been an increase in exemptions or vaccine refusals. SIEGEL: And the trend over the past decade has been for more exceptions, more refusals, more cases of diseases that you could be vaccinated for. At the national level, the estimates are a little over 2 percent. So there's a lot of variability in state-level vaccine refusals. OMER: So we are talking about, in terms of the exemptions - they range from a little less than 1 percent to around 6-7 percent in states. How many unvaccinated children are we talking about? SIEGEL: You found that in states where it's easier to get a nonmedical exemption, inoculations went down and disease rates went up. He has studied and written about these exemptions, and he joins us now to talk about them. ![]() Saad Omer is an epidemiologist with the Emory Vaccine Center in Atlanta. Mississippi and West Virginia are the only states that ban all nonmedical exemptions. These laws vary from state to state - 48 states allow for religious exemptions, and 19 states allow parents to opt out of vaccinating their children based on personal or philosophical beliefs. One factor in the number of non-vaccinated children are state laws regulating nonmedical exemptions.
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