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More than half of Santa Fe Waldorf School students received a vaccination exemption from the state in 2012, according to data released Friday by the New Mexico Department of Health, which recently warned that the spike in vaccination exemptions since 2012 "can increase the risk for outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, such as measles."
Waldorf bills itself as the "only private school in Santa Fe offering the complete educational journey from preschool through high school," and is set on a 13-acre campus in southeast Santa Fe. In 2012, the Department of Health Immunization Program granted 106 of the school's 205 students exemptions for vaccinations, according to the data, which pegs the school's exemption rate per 1,000 students at 517.1.
That's by far the highest rate that year in Santa Fe County, records show. Comparatively, the collective exemption rate for the 40 Santa Fe schools listed in the records was 24.5 per 1,000 students in 2012, according to the data. Officials at Waldorf did not answer a telephone call made late Friday.
Statewide in 2012, nearly 5 out of every 1,000 individuals ages 0-19 received a vaccine exemption in 2012, according to DOH, or an exemption rate of 4.9 per 1,000.
"The New Mexico Immunization Exemption Statute (24-5-3) allows only two types of exemptions for children seeking exemption from required immunizations to enter school, childcare or preschool," states the DOH website. "The two exemptions are medical or religious."
Medical vaccine exemptions for children need a signature from a
licensed physician "attesting that the required immunization(s) would
endanger the life of the child," states DOH.
For a religious exemption, according to DOH, a child's parent or guardian needs to ask "an officer of the church" to write a letter stating that "you are a member of the church, and the church uses prayer or spiritual means alone for healing." If access to a church officer is not possible, states DOH, then the child's parent or guardian must complete an exemption form that "requires a statement of the religious reasons for requesting to have a child exempted from immunization."
"The law does not grant immunization exemptions for philosophical or personal reasons," according to DOH.
Acequia Madre Elementary School clocked in with the second highest exemption rate for schools in the county in 2012. With a 2012-13 enrollment of 173, 22 students received vaccine exemptions, according to the data. That's a rate of about 127 per every 1,000 students. Temple Beth Shalom Preschool earned the third-highest exemption rate in the county in 2012, records show, a rate of 117.6 per 1,000 students. But that might be by virtue of its small enrollment of 17. Two students were granted exemptions that year, show the records.
Santo Nino Regional Regional Catholic School, with none of its 330 students seeking a vaccination exemption in 2012, had the lowest rate, according to the records.
The records shed new light on how the national vaccination debate has reverberated in Santa Fe. Last year, the number of exemptions for children receiving vaccinations spiked 17 percent from 2012, to 3,335 statewide, according to DOH.
"An ongoing measles outbreak linked to Disneyland theme park in Orange County, California is highlighting the importance of vaccinations, and drawing attention to the public health risk associated with declining to get immunized," reads a DOH statement. "In 2015, there have been 84 measles cases in 14 states. Most of the cases are linked to the park outbreak."
“We know the majority of the people who get measles are unvaccinated,” said Department of Health Secretary Retta Ward in a statement. “Since measles is still common in many parts of the world and travelers with measles continue to bring the disease into the US, we want all New Mexicans to know that it can spread when it reaches communities where groups of people are unvaccinated.”
Santa Fe Public Schools board president Steven Carrillo announced Thursday evening that the district would ban children from class who relieved vaccination exemptions, starting February 17, reports The Santa Fe New Mexican.
SFR this week requested DOH provide vaccination exemption data per school. Kenny Vigil, DOH spokesman, said the department only possessed data per county. That data showed that in 2014, the state issued 659 vaccine exemptions. The data list 25,370 children ages 4-18 lived in the county that year, and that for every 1,000 of them, about 26 received vaccine exemptions.
But Friday, Vigil provided SFR a breakdown of vaccine exemptions per school in Santa Fe County, Los Alamos County and Taos County for 2012. He said the department is working on collecting data, broken down by school, from other years.
The 2012 data include only vaccine exemptions granted by DOH, and does not include home-school students.
"Schools that could be classified and did not appear on the [DOH] Immunization Program list of schools with active exemptions were assumed to have no vaccine exemptors," state the records.
DOH did not analyze the exemption rates for sixteen schools in Santa Fe County "because data were either not available or information was inadequate to classify the school."
The outbreak linked to Disneyland concerned only measles, a "respiratory disease caused by a virus," according to DOH, that's "so contagious that if one infected person has it, 9 out of 10 exposed people who are not immune will also become infected."
The state records used for this report do not specify what vaccination a child might have been exempted from receiving in 2012.
Click the shaded-in squares located at the bottom right corners of the PDFs for a better view of the records.
LOS ALAMOS COUNTY VACCINATION EXEMPTIONS BY SCHOOL, 2012
TAOS COUNTY VACCINATION EXEMPTIONS BY SCHOOL, 2012
Santa Fe Reporter