Should refusing vaccines be a civil right in Michigan? Some lawmakers say yes

• A package of bills would weaken how Michigan enforces vaccine mandates 
• Meanwhile in Washington, the Trump administration has shifted many long-held vaccine policies
• HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired the 17 members of the nation’s vaccine advisory committee this week and replaced them

Some lawmakers in Lansing are pushing legislation that would prevent Michigan from enforcing vaccine mandates for school children and force the state to extend civil rights protections to residents who reject immunizations. 

A GOP-led bill in the House would amend the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination based on “vaccination status,” adding it to a list of other protected classes like religion, sexual orientation and race.

“The way our country operates, the freedom that we enjoy should also be extended to the freedom not to inject ourselves with something that we object to,” said Rep. Jim DeSana, R-Carleton, who introduced the measure.

In a news conference, DeSana referred to people forced to leave their jobs for refusing to be vaccinated against COVID-19 during the pandemic. “We all have friends that got their vaccinate-or-leave letter from their employer and how difficult that was for their lives, and many of them left their employers, left 25 to 30 year employment, in refusal to take the mRNA vaccine,” DeSana said. “How awful it was that we as a society stood by and allowed that to happen.”

DeSana is also co-sponsor on a separate package of “vaccine freedom” bills that would weaken immunization enforcement in Michigan. 

HB 4552 and HB 4553 would prevent local health officers from barring children without immunization records from attending school.

“I believe that there is a movement afoot in society that believes in vaccine freedom, and it polls very popularly with the people,” DeSana told Bridge Michigan. “A good portion of our population believes that it should be your choice whether you vaccinate or not.”

Vaccine waivers trend up

Michigan began requiring immunization documentation for students in 1978 and now requires six different types of vaccinations for children to attend school by the time they reach 7th grade, including for polio, measles and chickenpox.

Parents are allowed to opt out of vaccinations for their children by obtaining a waiver for medical and nonmedical reasons, including religious or philosophical convictions. 

The state saw a dropoff of immunization waivers beginning in 2014 after mandating local health departments to sign off on nonmedical exemptions, requiring parents of students to “receive education on the benefits of vaccination and the risks of disease.”

Waivers for immunizations have been on the rise for all grades since 2021, according to the state health department, which notes an “an overall decline in childhood immunizations during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Waiver rates increased to 5.7% in 2023, its highest rate in the decade since the education requirement was added to the opt-out process. Religious exceptions accounted for 40% of the total waivers granted that year, representing a nearly two-fold increase in the same period.

With official data still forthcoming, provisional data suggests about 6.8% of kindergarteners and 6.1% of 7th grade students in Michigan obtained a vaccination waiver in 2024.

DeSana said the state required his family to participate in an informational presentation when they sought a vaccination waiver, and that was a motivating force behind the legislation. 

“The state health department, I believe, has already gone beyond their authority,” said DeSana, adding that pursuing a civil rights action would offer “expansive” discrimination protections.

“It’s pretty emphatic,” he said. “You cannot discriminate based on vaccine status in employment and schooling and the buildings that you enter.”

Federal moves

The state legislation is occurring at a time where vaccine policy nationwide is being overhauled.

US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. culled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) earlier this month, replacing the 17-member panel with a new slate of advisers.

Among them is Vicky Pebsworth, who earned her doctorate in public health and nursing from the University of Michigan and held various policy analyst roles in the state. 

A regional director for the National Association of Catholic Nurses, Pebsworth states in her biography that the vaccines her son received at 15-months caused long-term health problems.

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“Using coercion and sanctions to persuade adults to take an experimental vaccine, or give it to their children, is unethical and unlawful,” Pebsworth said in 2020. She was testifying before the US Food and Drug Administration on behalf of the National Vaccine Information Center, a group that advocates for “informed consent” to vaccination.  

This week’s shakeup of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel cast in doubt the future of the current vaccine schedule and could lead to the unraveling of long-held vaccine policy throughout the states, including immunization requirements for school or to work in heath care settings, said Dr. Pamela Rockwell, a family physician and professor of family medicine at U-M. 

Rockwell served as the American Academy of Family Physicians’ liaison to the ACIP.

“There is a possibility that what we now know as routine childhood recommended vaccines and adult vaccines … go away,” Rockwell said.

Rockwell chairs the Michigan Advisory Committee on Immunizations, which  is working to make sure Michigan continues to honor recommendations from the CDC, even if they change on a national level. 

“We will be sort of the new experts. I’m viewing (the Michigan Advisory Council on Immunizations) now as our state ACIP,” she said.

For now, nothing has changed, she said: “We're just preparing for it,” she said.

Skepticism future

The removal of health care experts and the proliferation of vaccine skepticism on the national stage has been a "disappointing" development for epidemiologists like Abram Wagner, who investigates vaccine programs at the U-M School of Public Health.

“Right now, we’re living in this top-down world where one person can make huge changes,” Wagner said.

Most Americans trust vaccines, Wagner says, with a significant group of “fencesitters” that require additional outreach from health care providers to advocate for immunizations. 

Hardline anti-vaxxers only represent a small minority, he says, but when enough vaccine-reluctant people cluster together in like-minded communities, it can pose a larger threat during the outbreak of disease, especially without broader government controls.

“I think the problem with getting rid of mandates is that we’re likely to lead to more clustering of individuals who are not vaccinated,” Wagner said.

Some countries like the Netherlands have had success maintaining strong immunization rates without government mandates, Wagner says, and individual communication strategies can improve feelings about vaccination.

But Wagner advocates for large-scale strategies that can target bigger populations, especially as “counter science narratives” become more popular.

He believes the current climate of vaccine hesitancy can be attributed to a “swing in the pendulum” where the overwhelming efficacy of the treatment has shielded many from the horrors of widespread epidemics.

“We don’t have an entire population of people from the ‘50s and before who died from measles. We don’t hear their stories,” he said. “I think we’re not at a place where there is a consensus view of western science.”

Overall, the direction of future vaccine policy remains unknown, but removing legal frameworks has a clear implication for Wagner.

“We do not have a stopgap if the government stops funding things,” he said. “Societies have limited ability to push out messaging at the scale that governments are able to do, and that’s just unfortunate.”