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Texans For Vaccine Choice’s mission, according to Schlegel-Polvado, is to guard parents’ rights to opt out of vaccine requirements — whether that means targeting legislators who seek to close non-medical exemptions or pushing for policies that otherwise protect parents who choose not to vaccinate, like preventing physicians from excluding them from their practices.
In this year's primary elections, that meant going after state Rep. Jason Villalba, the Dallas Republican who filed the bill.
“The animus that was leveled against me for that was very surprising to me,” said Villalba, who ultimately won his race. “These people, they literally said it to my face — they hate me. That was troubling. Because I get it, they care about their children — but I care about my children too, and the children of the community.”
When he filed the bill last session, Villalba, a father of three, said he expected it to be non-controversial. Like other lawmakers around the country who have pushed to re-examine vaccine laws — including in California and Vermont, which last year successfully limited provisions allowing non-medical exemptions — he was motivated by recent outbreaks of diseases like measles and whooping cough that medical officials attributed to growing numbers of parents choosing not to vaccinate their children.
. . . Pediatricians — many of whom have watched with dismay as the number of parents choosing not to vaccinate their children has climbed — widely support the elimination of non-medical exemptions to immunization requirements.
"In my opinion, there are no good, valid reasons for deferring vaccinations or not vaccinating based on religion or philosophical objection," said Dr. Jason Terk, a pediatrician at Cook Children's Hospital in Keller. "It is my firm conclusion that vaccines and the benefit they provide to individuals and the rest of the public is well founded."
Terk said low immunization rates brought an undeniable risk of otherwise preventable deadly disease outbreaks.
"That is not a theoretical argument; that is something that we’ve seen occur in the parts of U.S. where the frequency of non-vaccination is significantly higher, and those locales are precisely the places where we’ve seen outbreaks," he said.
But for parents like Schlegel-Polvado, who have children they believe have been harmed by vaccines, any proposal to end exemptions is a battle call.
“You come after parental rights, we are going to fight back,” said Schlegel-Polvado, who discontinued vaccinating her younger two children after concluding that a childhood DTaP immunization led to brain damage in her now-15-year-old daughter, Ashlyn.
During the 2015 legislative session, Villalba said he quickly became acquainted with the passion of the anti-vaccine movement’s supporters, many of whom believe the undue influence of pharmaceutical companies has led to an overabundance of immunization requirements that come at the expense of children’s health.
“This is a group that is very dedicated, very organized; this issue is very important to them,” he said.
