Kaua‘i North Shore schools top list of religious vaccine exemptions

LIHU‘E — Students on the North Shore of Kaua‘i are among the most likely in Hawai‘i to opt out of routine vaccinations for religious reasons, data from the state Department of Education shows.

Hawai‘i public school students are required to receive a slate of non-COVID-19 vaccines, which vary based on grade level, and include protection against hepatitis, measles, mumps, polio, chickenpox and tetanus. But parents can exempt their children by filling out a form asserting “immunization conflicts with (their) bona fide religious tenets and practices.”

The Department of Health exemption report for this school year showed that schools in Hanalei, Kilauea and Anahola had among the highest rates of religious exemptions statewide — ranging from 29 to 37 percent of the total student body.

Topping the DOH list is Hanalei School, where more than one-third (36.5 percent) of the 197 students received a religious exemption.

Almost half of the students (47.2 percent) have incomplete immunizations — a category that includes religious exemptions, medical exemptions and students with no immunization record or missing immunizations.

At Kilauea School, 31.3 percent of students had a religious exemption, and 35.6 percent had incomplete immunizations. And at Kanuikapono Public Charter School in Anahola, those percentages were 29 and 37, respectively.

The DOH Kaua‘i District Health Officer Dr. Janet Berreman warned about the risk of having large populations of unvaccinated students in a school together.

“Even more than on an individual basis, they can cause outbreaks by spreading it to their classmates. If their classmates are mostly vaccinated, you’re not so likely to see outbreaks. But if their classmates are mostly unvaccinated, there’s a much greater risk of getting transmission within that school,” Berreman said.

“That then becomes a risk for students, staff, and even family members that aren’t at the school. What feels like an individual decision is actually a decision that has an impact beyond that individual child.”

Throughout the state, there has been a rise in students missing routine vaccinations, likely spurred on by the increasing politicization of public health issues during the COVID-19 pandemic.

While students are not required to get a COVID-19 vaccine to attend school, the pandemic seems to have played a role in increasing vaccine skepticism.

DOH data shows 3.4 percent of schoolchildren statewide had incomplete immunization records in 2019 — a number that jumped to 18.6 percent this school year. The number of students claiming a religious exemption increased from 2 percent in 2019 to 3 percent this year.

The New York Times reported in April 2022 that routine vaccinations had fallen nationwide during the pandemic as well, tied to a surge of COVID-19 vaccine-related disinformation.

For Our Rights, an anti-vaccine, anti-mandate nonprofit based in Kapa‘a, has been a leading voice against the COVID-19 vaccine, frequently citing anecdotal reports of negative vaccine impacts in its newsletter.

“The truth is there was no COVID-19 disease — only vaccine injury,” the group wrote in its February newsletter.

Berreman said cases of adverse reactions to both the COVID-19 vaccine and other routine vaccines were often matters of association rather than causation, and that bad outcomes from all vaccinations are highly unusual.

Vaccine skepticism has led to a recent rise in diseases that appeared to have been largely eradicated in the United States.

A 2017-18 mumps outbreak sickened 49 people on Kaua‘i, and more than 1,000 statewide. Last summer, New York reported the first case of polio in nearly a decade.

“Over the last 100 years, vaccines have been one of the biggest successes of public health, and have saved countless lives,” Berreman said. “What we’re seeing, because we’re becoming complacent and not vaccinating our children, are returns of all these diseases — whooping cough, measles, mumps, and now we’ve seen polio in this country, which many of us thought would never happen again.”

Much of the data on the vaccinations remains unreported. The rate of religious exemptions for about half of the Kaua‘i schools was not listed in the latest DOH immunization exemption report.

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Guthrie Scrimgeour, reporter, can be reached at 808-647-0329 or gscrimgeour@thegardenisland.com.