For several years, a bill to make the HPV vaccine mandatory for school kids has languished in committee each legislative session. But now, New York has tougher vaccine rules, and the bill is getting renewed attention from both sides of the vaccine divide.
“I think because of the change in the law, it made it more visible,” Assemblywoman Amy Paulin said Monday. “If I see an opportunity, I push my bills. And I see an opportunity.”
Last June, amid a measles outbreak in Rockland County and Brooklyn, the state scrapped religious exemptions for school-mandated vaccines. Measles cases had spread in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, where more than half of students at some yeshivas hadn’t been vaccinated. Stricter regulations, which started in September, only allow medical exemptions for unvaccinated students in public, private and parochial schools.
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