California’s controversial new law that requires almost all schoolchildren to be fully vaccinated in order to attend public or private school, regardless of their parents’ personal or religious beliefs, kicks in this coming school year.
That’s when students at certain check points — those entering childcare, kindergarten and 7th grade — must meet the state’s vaccination requirements. Exceptions include students who attend a home-based private school or an independent study program and do not receive classroom-based instruction.
Well-known proponents of SB 277, including Dorit Reiss, a professor and vaccine law expert at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, have been waiting for the next round of attacks on the law by those who want to strike it down. One strike arrived in late April, after Las Vegas-based T. Matthew Phillips — a self-described “trial attorney with disdain for science and evidence based medicine’’ — filed a 21-page complaint in Los Angeles County Superior Court on behalf of eight Southern California residents who are seeking an injunction to stop the law from taking effect.
While the suit didn’t surprise Reiss, she called it sloppy and poorly drafted with “gross factual errors” in its “incoherent legal argument.” As Reiss wrote in her detailed, point-by-point critique on the Skeptical Raptor’s Blog (http://bit.ly/21BUTVd): “Frankly, the people who donated money to this suit deserved better.’’
Phillips didn’t appreciate that, responding on Facebook that Reiss “is NOT a lawyer.”
“She is NOT entitled to give legal advice on SB 277,” Phillips wrote. “If you expect to debate the law, y’all pro-vaxxers need to find some actual lawyers, not half-steppin lawyer wanna bees.”
