The League of Women Voters of Massachusetts has endorsed and testified in support of S.1517/H.2271, An Act Promoting Community Immunity.
This bill is currently in jeopardy of being killed off by the house. Please send emails to Chairs Marjorie Decker and Jo Comerford of the Joint Committee on Public Health, Senate President Karen Spilka, and House Speaker Ron Marino, urging them to move the bill out favorably. Their emails are as follows:
For your convenience, here is a template email you can use:
“Dear Speaker Mariano, Senate President Spilka, Chair Decker, and Chair Comerford:
I urge you in the strongest possible terms to release the Community Immunity Act from the Public Health Committee today and send it to the Senate for speedy consideration. We are quite literally living through the consequences of our state’s drastic flaws in infectious disease prevention infrastructure. This bill, carefully crafted with input from experts in both public health and government administration, provides the infrastructure we desperately and obviously need. In the 2019-2020 school year, nearly 100 kindergarten programs throughout the state had 10% or more of their students missing vaccines and also missing an exemption form; that is an infrastructure problem. In the same school year, more than 2,000 school and daycare programs failed to report any vaccination or immunization data to the Department of Public Health; that is an infrastructure problem. We have no statutory support for DPH to do concerted and targeted education and outreach in communities at an elevated risk for the spread of infectious disease; that is an infrastructure problem. We have no notification to parents and caregivers when programs their children attend drop below herd immunity rates for measles, whooping cough, polio, or any other vaccine-preventable infectious disease; that is an infrastructure problem.We have serious immunization infrastructure problems and we need a serious immunization infrastructure bill to fix it. The Community Immunity Act is that bill. Failing to advance and enact this bill will be failing all of us throughout Massachusetts, and particularly the communities hardest hit by COVID-19.Thank you in advance for your support.
Respectfully,”