California kindergarten vaccination rates reach all-time high in aftermath of new law

I am a market researcher by career and so look at data and know how you can make data tell any story. The data in this summary looks manipulated to tell the story that they want to hear. As an advocate against SB277, I will tell you another story the data tells:

• Why did it take until April of this year to release the data, which is usually released the first few weeks in January? Maybe because they were trying to get more data, or work out how to spin the data? Note: last year’s data was published on 1/19/16.
• 446 California elementary schools, including 362 private schools and 84 public schools, did not report their immunization data. This is 5.4% of the schools that did not report, compared to 3.3% of that in 2015 year.
• How many children were eligible for kindergarten in 2016? How many of those homeschooled or did not go to kindergarten (not required in CA this year) instead? You have a law that mandates all kids in school to be vaccinated, but the data only shows those kids, not the ones that are kindergarten aged that are not in school or homeschool. So you would expect the vaccine rates to be 100% minus the number that have a medical exemption or IEP.
• Realistically if you look at the numbers on page 16. The real story becomes clear. The increase in vaccinations comes primarily from conditional entrants. Increase in all required immunizations = 2.8%. Decrease in conditional entrants = -2.5%. Is this because the school reporting was delayed until April when most of the conditional entrants would have been up to date because they completed the series and no longer be conditional? Or was it that the second measles vaccine (MMR) was the culprit of the conditional entrance because it is recommended to be given between 4-6 years so prior to this year parents got it during the kindergarten year, but it is now a requirement of kindergarten entrance. If the prior year’s data was looked at at the end of the kindergarten year, the numbers were likely similar.
• From their caveats, “Part of the relative improvements in the completion rates of specific vaccines may have been due to the inclusion in reporting this year of doses received by partially immunized children who had PBEs or PMEs to other required immunizations. In reporting to CDPH during prior school years, doses received by children with exemptions were not included in completion rates for any specific vaccine. This may have resulted in underestimates of completion rates in prior years and overestimates of the increases in the completion rates for specific vaccines between 2016-2017 and prior years. The magnitude of the resultant increase to the rate of any immunization series in 2016-2017 resulting from this change in reporting could be no greater than 1.5%, the total of students reported in categories as not having to receive all required immunizations (PMEs, PBEs or the new category of other criteria specified in SB 277). This reporting change should not have affected rates, or changes in rates, for the category of having received all required vaccines.” Yet we don’t know if children were just missing one vaccine such as the chicken pox vaccine or the Hep B vaccine, and so were very close to being fully vaccinated last year, because they would have had to have a PBE and therefore none of their vaccines would have been counted. If they were just missing one vaccine it is likely their parents if forced would give that one. We don’t know that that was not the case last year and in years previous.
• Another caveat given in the report…”The presence of incomplete records would underestimate immunization coverage. Any improvements over time in completion of records since the time of reporting would increase estimates of coverage.” And “Changes over time in the quality of reporting by schools are another potential explanation for changes in immunization rates.” We know that in 2016 before the start of the school year, the gauntlet was thrown down on schools with emails from CDPH and county health departments ensuring schools knew they had to submit vaccination rates and each parent was made to give their vaccination information before being allowed to apply at many public schools. Students without up to date vaccination information were not allowed to register for classes.

Given all of this it is very hard to tell if vaccination rates really went up among all kindergartners in California. If I had to guess, it looks like the lift came from conditional entrants having higher vaccination rates, but each of the above may be contributors. It is not an apples-to-apples comparison year over year. I ask that you put the above into your article so it is clear that really it is not clear if there was a true raise in vaccine rates among kindergarten aged children or if it was just manipulated in the summary to look that way.

Almost 3 years ago, Dr. William Thompson, one of the senior scientists at the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC for short) came forward publicly and basically said his agency was committing scientific fraud in their vaccine research.

His comments are huge, because the entire vaccination program nationwide is based on the CDC’s own safety studies. Manipulating their results brings the entire program into question.
It’s recently learned that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee of the U.S. Congress may now be officially investigating the matter.