Republican lawmakers block meningitis vaccine requirement for students

MADISON – Republicans who control the state Legislature have blocked state health officials' effort to require middle-school students be vaccinated against meningitis.

The state Assembly and state Senate voted Wednesday to bar Democratic Gov. Tony Evers' administration from implementing a new rule that would have required seventh graders to get vaccinated against meningitis and mandated parents to show proof their children were infected with chickenpox before obtaining a waiver from the state's chickenpox vaccination requirement.

The floor action came after a Republican-controlled Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules voted in March to block the rule after a public hearing during which GOP members questioned the decision-making of state health officials, largely because they disagreed with their orders to shutter businesses in the weeks after Evers declared a health emergency over COVID-19 and to wear masks during the most threatening periods of the coronavirus pandemic.

Wisconsin's chief medical officer Ryan Westergaard told the committee in March he and others within the state Department of Health Services in the early weeks of the pandemic recommended rules based on the limited knowledge they had about COVID-19, which was new in 2019.

"2020 was a scary time. I don’t recall saying I anticipated the state would be shut down for more than a year but I more than likely said we could be dealing with a deadly pandemic for more than a year," he said.

Westergaard said his proposals — including the rule to mandate meningitis vaccines — are based on keeping as many children alive and healthy as possible. He also recounted his personal experiences, including a college classmate who died of meningitis just hours after feeling ill and another who was hospitalized for a month and had a limb amputated because of the disease.

"I imagine the depth of their grief being unfathomable… but now as a parent of teenagers I can imagine it and there’s no single thing that I dread more," Westergaard said. "We prepare so in those tragic moments when we lose someone we say, yes, we could do everything we could do."

Wednesday's move blocked until April 2024 state Department of Health Services rules that would have:

• Required seventh graders to be vaccinated against meningitis and for 12th graders to receive a booster shot.

• Mandated parents have a doctor tell school officials that their child has had a previous chickenpox infection in order for the child to receive an exemption from the chickenpox vaccine requirement for school-age students.

• Exclude chickenpox and meningitis outbreaks from a list of diseases subject to DHS outbreak rules.

The decision means schools won't be able to include those rules alongside their other vaccination requirements in the meantime. Previously, Wisconsin recommended but did not require school-age children to get a vaccine for meningitis protection.

Here's a guide to the Department of Health Services' school immunization requirements.

Molly Beck can be reached at molly.beck@jrn.com.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin Republicans block meningitis vaccine requirement