By Allison Jarrell
A new report from the Orange County Grand Jury shows that while the number of students vaccinated in the Capistrano Unified School District rose significantly over the last year, CUSD still has the second lowest percentage of vaccinated students in the county.
The report, released on May 15, is titled, “Ouch! – Now That Didn’t Hurt: The Implementation of the Vaccination Bill SB 277 in Orange County Schools.” The report examines how school districts across the county have adhered to new vaccination requirements for public schools.
Of the 12 Orange County school districts studied, CUSD was one of two districts that had an increase in the number of vaccinated kindergarten students but still remained below the “recommended herd immunity threshold,” which is 92-94 percent, as defined by the California Department of Public Health. The district had a 5.8 percent increase in vaccinated kindergarteners between the 2015-16 school year and 2016-17, taking the percentage from 84.4 to 90.2. The percentage of conditional kindergarten students in CUSD—those who don’t meet all the vaccination requirements—decreased from 4.7 percent in 2015-16 to 3.9 percent in 2016-17.
The only district with a lower percentage of vaccinated kindergarten students is Laguna Beach, with 85.6 percent in 2016-17.
The Grand Jury concluded its report with two recommendations, the first being that each school district continue to track students with “grandfathered personal belief exemptions to ensure that these students have the required vaccinations before they reach the next reporting levels.” The second recommendation was that districts continue to “monitor student vaccination percentages to maintain the threshold defined by the CDPH.”
To view the complete report, visit www.ocgrandjury.org.
To those that believe in vaccination, great! If you believe they work then you have nothing to worry about. I am sure you did your research and started with the vaccine inserts on the CDC site as well as studies on Combo vaccines. What you didn’t find any? You are right, there are not any. 🙁 Congrats to the Moms and the Dads , who did their research and chose not to vaccinate. Congrats to the Moms and Dads of those with vaccine injured children not to be bullied into more vaccines that could further cripple or kill your children. Vaccine Injury is real and it effects not just one family member but the entire family.
Thank goodness for the vaccination bill. It will take years for vaccine rates to go up significantly since we are only tracking kids in kindergarten and 7th grade. As a pediatrician for over 25 years and a mother of 3 who has fully vaccinated all her children, I don’t just “believe” in vaccines, I have studied them and their safety as well as have a full understanding of the mechanisms of action of vaccinations. As an expert who did her research by going to multiple schools and practicing medicine for a long time, I can say with certainty that vaccine safety is real , and vaccine effectiveness is life saving, vaccine denial is sad.
My research consisted of asking my pediatrician, a dear friend who is a nurse (and her sister in law is a pediatrician that specializes in infectious diseases). When it comes to vaccinations, I can’t imagine anyone I’d trust more than those three people. I guess I could have asked my mother who lost a brother as a child to an infectious disease.