On June 30th, 2015, Governor Jerry Brown passed the California Vaccination Bill, and now a year later the bill has finally gone into effect.

It is now mandatory to receive every up-to-date vaccine in order to enroll in any private or public school, day care, preschool, and afterschool programs.

The bill also states student who do not take any vaccines cannot be enrolled in school and must be homeschooled.

This takes away a parent’s right to exempt their kids from vaccinations for personal and religious purposes, creating a rift in opinions amongst parents in California.

The bill has received mixed reactions. People who are against it say that it violates their parental rights and the ones in favor of it say that it is needed to boost statewide immunization rates.

For years, misconceptions of vaccinations have risen, causing those who disagree with vaccines to be against the bill.

Some misconceptions are that vaccines are too much for infants and that they are no longer needed with improved hygiene and nutrition.

Such misconceptions have scared parents into not vaccinating their children.

However, through extensive research, health-care workers and doctors have tried their best to assure people that those misconceptions are false and that vaccines are very much needed.

With the bill making waves amongst the general public, it has washed ashore on the minds of the people on campus.

“I think a lot of parents were signing personal belief waivers so that their child wouldn’t have to get another vaccine, which I don’t think is good because we’ve had a lot of communicable diseases  on the rise in the past couple of years such as pertussis which is the whooping cough, the chickenpox outbreak, and measles outbreak,” PVHS nurse Marissa Trevett said.

“That can make people really sick and if people get sick enough potentially, you know they can have a really serious illness and could even sometimes have death.”

Many Sea Kings agree.

“I do think that vaccinations should be required for kids going into school because you wouldn’t want a kid getting sick and getting other kids sick,” said Junior Robbie Rodriguez.

“For all the parents that are all paranoid about something happening with vaccinations, I don’t think there’s any reason to be paranoid and think that schools should not require vaccination before they go into school,” he said.

According to Karen Kaplan, the science and medicine editor of the Los Angeles Times, “Based on historical data, infectious disease experts know that in the absence of any vaccination, a single person infected with measles can spread it to between 11 and 18 other people. They also know that it takes 10 to 14 days for one measles case to lead to another.”

Recent outbreak of diseases, such as the measles outbreak at Disneyland last year, have been linked to a refusal to receive vaccinations.

This makes it easy for a disease to spread at a highly populated place such as Disneyland or schools, thus pushing drastic actions against diseases by increasing immunization.

Overall, studies are showing that vaccinations are necessary to prevent outbreaks.

While controversial, the California Vaccination Bill is now mandatory for enrolling in all kinds of schools, regardless of what parents think about it.