Senate lawmakers move to step up vaccine tracking as vaccination rates fall

Yahoo

19-05-2025

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week reported 1,024 confirmed measles cases across 31 states — including three in New Jersey — so far in 2025, up sharply from 2024. (Photo by Illustration)
Lawmakers on a Senate panel approved measures meant to bolster vaccine uptake and better prepare for future outbreaks in divided votes Monday, showing some vaccine doubts spurred by the pandemic have persisted in New Jersey.
Both measures received votes of 5-3 from the Senate's health committee Monday, with all Democrats voting yes and all Republicans opposed. The first bill would require automatic enrollment in the state's vaccine registry, with some ability to opt out. The other is a resolution urging the state's residents to get immunized as vaccination rates fall and residents again contract some diseases once thought to be eradicated within the United States.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week reported 1,024 confirmed measles cases across 31 states — including three in New Jersey — so far in 2025, up sharply from the 285 confirmed cases reported for all of 2024. Three, including two unvaccinated children, have died after contracting measles this year.
'As a pediatrician, words cannot express the angst that is felt in our profession when we know these deaths were preventable,' said Dr. Jennifer Chuang, vice president-elect of the New Jersey chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The vaccine registry bill would require individuals not already enrolled in the New Jersey Immunization Information System, the state's vaccine registry, to be entered there when they next receive a vaccine.
It would allow patients — or their parents or guardians — to file written requests not to be entered into the registry, though another portion of the bill would allow the commissioner of health to deny such requests during public health emergencies or outbreaks of communicable diseases, among some others.
'By making the NJIIS registry an opt-out system rather than an opt-in, the state will be able to gather more data to be better prepared for the next pandemic,' said Sen. Joe Vitale (D-Middlesex), the legislation's prime sponsor and the panel's chair.
Under existing law, children born beginning in 1998 are automatically enrolled in the registry unless their parent or guardian opts out.
Critics of the bill said automatic enrollment could turn some away from vaccination.
'I think that this could end up having a, once again, unintended consequence of people who may have ordinarily gone in and gotten a certain vaccine deciding not to because now they're automatically put into a registry because of any sort of potential threat of any sort of outbreak, even if it's inapplicable to why the person's going in,' said Sen. Holly Schepisi (R-Bergen).
The resolution, a type of legislation with limited force of law, urges the Department of Health to increase awareness of measles within New Jersey, like by sending mailers on the benefits of vaccines and how to obtain them. The department is not required to comply with the resolution's urgings.
Dr. Susan Boruchoff, director of clinical services and education at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School's immunology and infectious diseases division, noted that the nation had 'just about completely eradicated measles from this country.'
'We had declared it eradicated — completely gone,' Boruchoff said. 'To have cases is different.'
The rise in measles cases has coincided with declines in uptake of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, more commonly called the MMR vaccine. Statewide, 90.4% of New Jersey teens aged 13 to 17 had received two doses of the MMR vaccine, the Department of Health said in an August 2024 brief.
Uptake rates for the MMR vaccine, which is typically administered to children no older than six, are lower in some counties, according to Chuang.
In Ocean County, 84.8% of students met school vaccination requirements in the 2023-2024 school year. Researchers have said a 95% vaccination rate is needed to maintain herd immunity against measles.
Anti-vaccine activists who testified to oppose the resolution charged vaccines were broadly ineffective, citing prevention rates for flu vaccines, which target specific prominent strains of influenza and vary in efficacy year-to-year.
There's little doubt the full Senate could find the votes to approve the measure, though protests over past vaccine measures could make that search more difficult.
In late 2019, months before New Jersey reported its first case of COVID-19, thousands of anti-vaccine protestors descended on the Statehouse for days of concerted protests targeting a bill that would have ended the state's religious exemption to school, child care, and university vaccine requirements.
Those protests — which included an appearance from anti-vaccine campaigner Robert Kennedy Jr., who is now U.S. secretary of health and human services, and enough calls to jam clog members' phone systems — stalled the legislation after peeling away support from a handful of Democrats in the Senate.
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