PA CHD Pressure on the Philadelphia School District Yields Results in MMR Communications to Unvaccinated Parents

It’s the tail end of measles season, and it appears our wizards at public health have finally found a case of measles in Pennsylvania. And the alarm bells are ringing out.

An 11-month-old child was hospitalized with a rash on March 10th at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The child was treated with vitamin A and is doing fine. Philadelphia’s new health commissioner, Dr. Palak Raval-Nelson, stated she was not concerned about a threat to the general public. An outbreak last January came and went without any lasting impact on the infected other than lifelong immunity to the virus and some added protection from several types of cancer.

During last year’s seasonal outbreak, Philadelphia’s School District’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Kendra McDow, issued a blitzkrieg of voicemails, text messages, and emails to the district’s 10,000 families whose children are unvaccinated or partially vaccinated (see text of email below). The messaging cherry-picked language from the PA’s School Code on immunizations to maximize fear in parents, threatening to remove their children from school if the school district’s demands were not met in two weeks. Note: there was no outbreak in any Philadelphia school, but only at a single daycare center.

The bold text is original to the email.

The Pennsylvania chapter immediately contacted the School District’s law department and sent off letters to Dr. McDow ordering her to immediately make corrections to this misinformation. We were assured a follow-up would be issued. A week later, after more contacts by PA CHD, a new message was finally sent that mentioned PA’s robust exemptions to immunization and directed parents to the immunization page on their website that was also updated to bring exemptions into the same sentence as the requirements.

PA CHD issued Right to Knows (RTK) to the Philadelphia Department of Public Health and the School District for all communications regarding the measles outbreak and the vaccine messaging. Both agencies asked for multiple extensions to the required responses stipulated by law. These were necessary to perform the near-total reduction of the requested documents.

Today the school district sounded the alarm once again, calling measles a “serious disease,” and although the child who is reported to have had measles was not a student in the city’s public schools, it notified parents of unvaccinated students that if a case was discovered in their school, their child would be excluded from coming to school. However, the notification on exemptions was found directly following the statement on requirements. “

Per Pennsylvania law, your child will not be able to attend school  unless  documentation showing proof that your child received the  required vaccine OR a signed exemption form is provided by April 1, 2025.

The email went on to state that “the amount of time a child will not be able to attend school will depend on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) established scientific guidelines on quarantine after exposure to an active measles case.”

PA CHD congratulates Dr. McDow and the school district, for now communicating the law correctly. The right to exemptions must always accompany, closely, any stated vaccine requirements. Now let’s see if the CDC can set a fair and constitutionally justified policy that does not discriminate against unvaccinated children as was recently set in Florida.