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Saturday, February 7, 2015

UC Announces It's on the Slow Train to a Vaccination Requirement

The choice
We have noted in prior posts that UC seems to be lazily moving to a vaccination requirement for incoming students by 2017. Why not now?  No one says.  Meanwhile, the slow route to 2017 has been officially announced to the news media:

All UC students will have to be vaccinated against measles, meningitis, whooping cough and several other diseases or they will not be allowed to register for classes in fall 2017, university officials announced Friday. Those shots will be in addition to the current systemwide requirement for the hepatitis B vaccine. The announcement has been in the works for years and was not triggered by the measles scare that has rattled the state, according to Gina Fleming, a high-ranking UC health official. If anything, she said, it was pushed by the 2013 meningitis outbreak at UC Santa Barbara that sickened four students and led to the amputations of one student's legs below the knees, she said...

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-uc-vaccines-20150207-story.html

Let's see if we understand. UC students got sick in 2013, one of whom ended up with a leg amputated. So in 2015, UC got to the point of setting in motion a policy to take effect in 2017.

Seems like UC had a choice between a fast train and a slow train and inexplicably took the slow one:
As we have noted in prior posts, UCLA could get on the fast train and invoke a ban now, whatever UC elects to do. And if it did, you can bet UC would switch to the fast train soon after.  Here is what the official UC announcement says about that issue:

"The intent of the plan is to set a baseline for all of UC, but does not prevent individual campuses from setting immunization standards for all students, or implementing the plan more rapidly."

See http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/uc-plans-require-vaccinations-incoming-students

That's a cop out. If it is OK for any individual campus to act faster, it is OK for all of them to do so. There is no reason it can't be so ordered. But since it isn't being so ordered, UCLA has clear authority to act.

Our earlier posts on this subject:
http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2015/01/how-about-measles-free-campus.html 
http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2015/02/proposed-ucla-ban-on-unvaccinated-in.html
http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2015/02/continuing-ucla-should-ban-unvaccinated.html 

In fact, we noted the issue as early as 2011!!!
http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2011/10/mumps.html

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