Who should decide on school vaccines – citizen legislators or health professionals?

There’s a bill before the New Hampshire legislature that would shift the authority to amend the list of diseases for which vaccines are required in school, taking it from the commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Services, and giving it to the state legislature.

The move is being made in the name of openness rather than limiting vaccinations, but the people who spoke in its favor Tuesday at a subcommittee hearing had a strong anti-vaccine slant, depicting vaccines as the dangerous product of pharmaceutical greed, physicians who are misled or chasing profit, and regulators who are in industry’s back pocket.

Here’s my story.