PORT HURON, Mich. — State health officials urged parents in several counties to vaccinate babies against measles ahead of schedule this spring as cases multiplied in Michigan. The outbreaks of the highly contagious virus — which can lead to brain swelling, deafness, and death — came as parents are opting school-age kids out of vaccinations at a record-high rate.
It’s a situation state officials have spent more than a decade trying to avoid. For years, they’ve been trying to make it harder for parents to send their kids to school unvaccinated.
But those efforts have backfired in places like St. Clair County, in Michigan’s conservative Thumb region. Remington Nevin, the county’s medical director, has declared “a new era of vaccine choice.” Local parents there can now bypass the usual protocols and get school vaccine waivers via email, days after they fill out a brief digital form.
State health officials aren’t fighting it.
Remington Nevin is the medical director for the St. Clair County Health Department in Michigan. The county is the first in the state to make vaccine waivers available to parents entirely online. Parents who have “felt pressured” into getting vaccines “are going to experience a new era of vaccine choice in St. Clair County,” Nevin said at a January board meeting. (Kate Wells/KFF Health News)
In fact, Michigan’s health agency has been helping more than 30 counties move away from a state policy once credited with sharply reducing the number of parents who opted their kids out of shots.
In 2015, the state started requiring parents seeking waivers to first attend a vaccine education session, in person, at their local health department.
But in the post-covid era, local health officials say, the sessions became hostile, ineffective, and sometimes even unsafe for staff. One high school called police last fall over an escalating dispute with parents who refused to obtain a state-recognized waiver for their children, with a sheriff’s deputy warning the parents that they could face criminal charges.
In response, the state has helped create a hybrid waiver process for dozens of counties, allowing parents to take a brief vaccine education course online while still requiring they get their waivers signed in person. It’s part of a broader shift in strategy in a state that had some of the most polarizing and politically divisive covid restrictions.
At Michigan schools where only 30% to 40% of students are now v …