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In 2016, California passed legislation eliminating personal-belief exemptions for childhood vaccination, joining Mississippi and West Virginia as the first states to do so. Now, investigators have examined publicly available immunization data on California kindergarteners to determine if implementation of the law improved vaccination rates in that population.
Changes from 2015 (the year before implementation of the law) to 2017 (the year after implementation of the law) were as follows:
Overall vaccine coverage increased from 92.85% to 95.13%.
Rates of personal-belief exemptions decreased from 2.37% to <0.01%.
Rates of conditional kindergarten entry (for children who were not up to date but were allowed to enroll as they caught up on their vacc…