By Howard Fischer | Capitol Media Services via Arizona Daily Star
A pilot program designed to increase vaccination rates among Arizona children ended up having the opposite effect.
The test in 16 Phoenix-area schools was aimed at parents who said they wanted to exercise their legal right under state law to exempt their children from the immunizations required to attend school. The parents in eight of the schools were shown one or more video “modules” detailing the effects of failing to vaccinate; parents in the other eight schools got the opt-out forms without the videos.
It didn’t work. In fact, it’s worse than that.
In the elementary schools where the video was shown to parents who did not want immunizations for their children, there was a slight increase in the number of exemptions sought in more than half of those schools, state health director Cara Christ said in a blog post Tuesday.
Conversely, in more than half of the schools where there was no video, there was a slight decrease in exemptions.
“Unfortunately, these weren’t the results we were hoping to see,” Christ said.
So what’s next?
