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In 2015, California became the third state (joining West Virginia and Mississippi) to eliminate personal belief exemptions (PBEs) for vaccination requirements for kindergarten attendance. Starting in January 2016, only medical exemptions were acceptable for children to attend school without a complete set of immunizations.
Using publicly available kindergarten entry data, researchers examined exemptions for all children in California from 1996 to 2016. PBEs slowly increased from 0.46% in 1996 to 2.37% in 2015, and medical exemptions increased slightly from 0.06% to 0.17%. In the year following implementation of the law, PBEs decreased to 0.56%, whereas medical exemptions rose to 0.51% — a threefold increase from the previous year. Total exem…