The politics of prevention

School vaccine wars are back … If you can’t abolish it, dismantle it … And they’re actually very amicable.

Measles cases have been exploding in west Texas in the last month, and now they’re spilling over into New Mexico and almost certainly continuing west to Arizona schools.

Hundreds of Texas residents have been infected, and about 30 Texans have already been hospitalized. An unvaccinated child died. In New Mexico, at least 30 people have been infected and an adult died last week. A few cases are already popping up in Oklahoma.

It’s really only a matter of time before it hits Arizona.

And the worst possible scenario, according to Arizona Public Health Association director and former state health director Will Humble, is that the first Arizona case will be in a school with low vaccination rates.

“If the doctor doesn’t catch that first case, and they were in a very poorly vaccinated school, then it can really mushroom very quickly,” Humble said.

Of course, there’s a simple solution for measles, which was officially declared eradicated in the United States 25 years ago.

But just as the once-dormant disease is making a resurgence, so is the anti-vaccine ideology that gripped the nation during the Covid pandemic.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the vaccine-skeptic leading the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, initially declared the Texas outbreak no big deal, then he later suggested people take vitamins to counter it.

Last week, he got serious, declaring he is “deeply concerned” about the outbreak, which “escalated rapidly.”

“Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, fringe political leaders are calling on constituents to have “measles parties” so kids can naturally vaccinate against measles.

Measles is a nasty disease that attacks the respiratory tract and causes high fevers, rashes and red spots, not to mention brain damage and other ongoing health complications. About 20% of unvaxxed people who catch measles end up in the hospital.

It’s also highly contagious: As many as nine out of 10 unvaccinated people who come in contact with an infected person catch the disease, for which there is no treatment. That’s far more contagious than Covid, the flu or even ebola.

The number of unvaccinated kids in Arizona schools has shot up by roughly 50% since 2020, and Arizona’s unvaccinated student rate is nearly three times the national average.

And the unvaccinated rate is far, far higher in many private and charter schools, Arizona Department of Health Services data shows.

Of the 100 Arizona schools with the lowest kindergarten vaccination rates against measles, 83 are private or charter schools. That figure is even more astounding when you consider that charter and private schools only account for about 30% of schools.

To achieve herd immunity levels for measles, a community must be 95% vaccinated, which is higher than the herd immunity rate for Covid, since measles is more contagious.

Currently, less than 90% of Arizona students are fully vaccinated against measles. And in some parts of rural Arizona, it’s far fewer. In Yavapai County, for example, the average student vaccination rate is closer to 75%, according to DHS data. In Gaines County, Texas, where the outbreak started, the vaccination rate is closer to 80%.¹

A student who contracts measles can wreak havoc on their classmates, both physically by spreading the disease, and academically, since any unvaccinated student exposed to the virus must stay home for two incubation periods, or 28 days, Humble said. Meaning, if an infected student shows up to a class with a 50% vaccination rate, half the class has to miss a month of school.

Arizona’s low vaccine rate is fueled by our lax school vaccine mandate, which allows parents to opt out of the state’s vaccine mandate for any reason. All but a handful of states have a “religious exemption” to their school vaccine mandates. But Arizona is one of only 18 states – including Texas – to allow parents to opt out for “personal beliefs.”

Parents don’t have to explain what that “personal belief” is – they just need to sign a form.

Fun fact: During his time as director of Arizona DHS, Humble remade this form to include that stern warning language about the potential consequences of not getting vaccinated, and make parents initial next to every vaccine they’re exempting their kid from.

Yet Arizona lawmakers are working to weaken Arizona’s basically meaningless mandate for children to get vaccinated against measles. Republican Rep. Lisa Fink’s HB2063, for example, would require schools to tell parents about Arizona’s liberal opt-out law in all communications about vaccines. In theory, that means if there’s a measles outbreak, school administrators would have to tell parents that they can opt out of vaccines in the same email telling them about the importance of vaccinations to combat the measles outbreak.

Fink’s HB2058,² meanwhile, would prohibit universities and community colleges from implementing vaccine mandates. Right now, state law doesn’t say anything about vaccines in higher education, leaving policies up to universities. Under Fink’s bill, colleges could only have a vaccine mandate policy if they also allow students to opt out for “personal beliefs.”

Those bills won’t become law as long as a governor is in the executive tower, but they reinforce the message that vaccines are a risky personal choice, rather than a risk-mitigating responsibility to your community.

Despite Arizona’s lax vax laws, there are a few things schools can do to boost vaccine adoption, Humble said.

Before the pandemic, more than a dozen schools were part of a pilot program that forced parents who opted out of vaccinations to watch a more-than 60-minute science-based educational video about the benefits of vaccines and risks of avoiding them. But anti-vax parents got upset, and Gov. Doug Ducey canceled the program after just one year. The department said it would revamp and expand the program, but it never did, Humble said. Schools could urge Gov. Katie Hobbs to restore and expand that program.

And while schools must accept exemption forms, they could stop proactively offering them, Humble suggested.

“There are schools that will hand the parent the personal exemption form and say just sign this and the student can start. And when you find your vaccine records, you can bring them in,” Humble said. “So encouraging vaccinations up front and not being so accommodating with the personal exemptions is one main thing schools can do.”

Department of educational efficiency: President Donald Trump’s education secretary fired or bought out half of the employees at the U.S. Department of Education, calling the move evidence of Trump’s “commitment to efficiency,” the New York Times reported yesterday. Trump wants to eliminate the department completely but doesn’t have the authority to do so without congressional approval. In the meantime, he’s attempting to move Education Department responsibilities to other similarly slimmed government agencies – like putting student loans under the Treasury Department, civil rights complaints under the Justice Department and disability services under the Health and Human Services Department.

Coming for ASU now: As the Trump administration goes after higher education, they now have Arizona State University in their crosshairs. ASU was one of 60 universities that are now under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education for possible civil rights violations against Jewish students, AZFamily reports. Last week, the Trump administration canceled $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University for what federal officials called “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students,” the New York Times reported. The officials didn’t point to any one event that concerned them. Instead, Trump’s new antisemitism task force said they were doing a comprehensive review and decided to pull the funding.

Budget check: An Arizona auditor general report found that most Arizona schools spent a smaller portion of their budget on classroom instruction last year than they did the year before, and Republican lawmakers blame school administrators, Capitol Media Services’ Howie Fischer reports. But Arizona spends less than the national average on administrative costs, and the decrease in instructional spending is happening for a host of reasons, from rising power costs to additional support services needed as charter and private schools often don’t take special needs students.

Glad he didn’t plead: A former Arizona Department of Education employee who was charged with multiple felonies for an alleged massive scam of the state’s school voucher system with “ghost students” was found not guilty in court after a two-week trial. Dorrian Jones was one of five people indicted in the scam, and the only one who didn’t plead guilty, the Capitol Times’ Kiera Riley reports.

Reining it in: After several years of parents making extravagant purchases with tax dollars, the new draft handbook for Arizona’s school voucher program has more accountability built into it, ABC15’s Elenee Dao reports. The new version includes caps on certain types of spending that have caused problems in the past, like physical education, smart boards, musical instruments, and appliances for home economics classes.

This button is like a voucher system for news organizations.
Except it doesn’t cost taxpayers anything.

Anti-DEI crusade comes to Mesa: Under pressure from the Trump administration to do away with DEI programs, Maricopa Community Colleges got rid of its Native American programs and convocation ceremony, the Republic’s Arlyssa D. Becenti reports.

Expensive uncertainty: Facing budget pressure and not knowing what will happen with Prop 123 funding, the Scottsdale Unified School District is looking to cut administrative costs at the district level, the Daily Independent’s J. Graber reports.

New digs: ASU’s new state-of-the-art medical school will be on the university’s downtown Phoenix campus, ASU officials announced. The new facility has been in the works for the past two years and ASU is partnering with HonorHealth, a nonprofit healthcare system, to pull it off, along with a $12 million bond from the City of Phoenix, KTAR’s Roxanne de la Rosa reports.

Social work students from Grand Canyon University spent a day meeting with their lawmakers and learning about the legislative process.

Instructor and faculty advisor Abigail Rebeske, said the day was a good reminder that social work isn’t just about helping individuals, but affecting change at a larger scale.

“For me, it’s easier to think of social work on the micro scale, through direct contact with individuals,” CGU junior Luke Bear told the school news service. “This experience highlighted how many opportunities for social workers there are in state government.”

But our favorite part of this heartwarming story of civic engagement has to be the lede:

“Contrary to what some might say these days, you can run into some very amicable politicians down at the state legislature.”

1. Gaines County is home to a significant community of Mennonites, who don’t vaccinate for religious reasons. Similarly, the lowest vaccination rates in Arizona come from Colorado City, which is essentially controlled by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

2. CORRECTION: Hank’s dyslexia kicked in and he jumbled the numbers on those two Fink bills. The correct bill numbers are HB2063 and HB2058.