Del. David Green, R-McDowell, addresses the House Friday, March 21, 2025, during discussion of amending Senate Bill 460, which loosens the state’s school vaccination requirements. The House adopted Green’s amendment, reinstating religious exemptions and allowing private and parochial schools to set their own policies. (Perry Bennett | West Virginia Legislative Photography)
After reinserting the religious exemptions originally in the bill, the West Virginia House of Delegates is poised to vote Monday on legislation that would loosen some of the country’s strictest school vaccination laws.
The House amended Senate Bill 460 on Friday, adopting an amendment from Del. David Green, R-McDowell, that would reinstate the religious exemptions that Gov. Patrick Morrisey mandated in an executive order and allow the state’s private and parochial schools to set their own vaccination policies.
“This country was founded on religious freedoms, religious liberty,” Green said in explaining his amendment. “As a young person, teenager going to school, I pondered this often. Why our state didn’t allow for religious exemptions? Today we can change that, and I trust that the body will vote with me to add this amendment in. This is not removing vaccine mandates, but this just gives people the ability to have that exemption based off of religious beliefs.”
The House adopted Green’s amendment with a vote of 52 to 44.
All states require school students to be vaccinated for a series of infectious diseases like measles and polio. West Virginia is currently one of only five that do not allow religious or philosophical exemptions to those requirements. On his second day in office, Morrisey issued an executive order requiring the state to allow religious exemptions to vaccination requirements
As it passed in the Senate, Senate Bill 460 would have allowed families who object to having their children vaccinated submit a written statement to their school administrator saying that they cannot get the vaccination because of religious reasons. It also loosened the process by which families can get medical exemptions to vaccination requirements,
The House Committee on Health and Human Resources removed religious exemptions from the bill process. Its version would have addressed only the medical exemption process. It would have allowed a child’s health care provider to submit a written statement from their licensed physician, physician assistant or nurse practitioner, if that health care provider determines it is or may be detrimental to the child’s health or not appropriate.
Current law requires the state’s immunization officer to review and decide any medical exemptions to vaccination requirements.
Health Committee Chairman Del. Evan Worrell, R-Cabell, said Friday his committee focused on the medical exemption process because there was a problem with it.
“We talked about solving problems this year in the House, and we saw that there was a problem with the current medical exemption piece,” Worrell told reporters after Friday’s floor session. “So we expanded that, taking into account what the Senate did. So that was the work of the committee. [There were] many different discussions on different things, but that was a problem we wanted to solve, and that’s why we presented that committee amendment.”
In the version the House adopted Friday, private and parochial schools could set their own vaccination policies. The Senate had voted down an amendment that would have allowed the private and parochial schools to set their own policies for vaccines.
The Catholic Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, with more than 4,600 students in 24 schools statewide, has supported the state’s current vaccine laws. Last year, after the Legislature passed House Bill 5105, a bill that would have allowed private and parochial schools to set their own vaccine requirements, the church said it would keep the requirements for its schools the same. A spokesman for the diocese previously said the church is monitoring the bill making its way through the statehouse.
“We have always maintained our constitutional right to order our schools as we see fit in accord with our beliefs,” Tim Bishop, director of marketing and communications for the diocese, said in a statement.
If the House passes the bill, the Senate will get a chance to vote on the House changes to the legislation.
Medical professionals, including many of the state’s school nurses and supporting organizations, oppose changing the state’s school vaccination requirements.
In a letter Friday, three former West Virginia state health officers — Dr. Matthew Christiansen, Dr. Ayne Amjad and Dr. Cathy Slemp, urged lawmakers not to add nonmedical exemptions to the school vaccination law.
“We respectfully urge you to not pass SB 460 (or related laws) in any form that would add non- medical exemptions or otherwise weaken the hard-earned protections keeping our children, families, and communities safe,” they wrote.
The House is expected to vote on the amended bill Monday.
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