Chickenpox vaccine now in courts of Boone County, where 2.6% of students have exemptions

In the past two school years, Boone County has been among the 10 Kentucky counties with the highest proportion of students with a religious exemption from vaccinations.

The clash of those religious exemptions with public health officials during a disease outbreak comes to court Monday. Boone County Circuit Judge J.R. Schrand will hear arguments from a senior at Assumption Academy in Walton who objected to the demand of public health officials for vaccinations against chickenpox when 32 students at his small Catholic school came down with the illness this year.

All 50 states require the chickenpox vaccine for school children. But 47 states, including Kentucky and Ohio, permit students to obtain exemptions to required vaccinations against illness for religious reasons.

Kentucky’s annual reports on childhood immunizations show Boone County, one of the most populous of the state’s 120 counties, ranks among the 10 with the highest %age of students with religious exemptions.

In the 2017-18 school year, the most recent for which data are available, 46 of 1,791 Boone County kindergarten students, or 2.57%, had religious exemptions. The county's exemption rate compares to the statewide rate of 0.96%. 

Kindergarten students in the commonwealth's fourth most populous county are roughly 2.5 times more likely to have such an exemption than their peers statewide. But even with the high exemption rate, less than 3 of 100 Boone County students aren't vaccinated.

The Boone County exemptions in 2017-18 rose from 1.6% in the previous school year.

Boone County had the seventh highest exemption rate, an Enquirer analysis of state data showed, behind Hopkins, Jessamine, Trimble, Campbell, McCracken and Calloway counties respectively.

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The lawsuit in Boone County was brought by Jerome Kunkel,18, of Walton. He sued in mid-March to argue his religious exemption should take precedence over public-health orders.

The senior at Assumption Academy told The Enquirer this month that getting an injection to protect against chickenpox would violate his conscious because that vaccine is made in laboratory-duplicated cells from a fetus aborted in England in 1966.

Covington lawyer Christopher Wiest, representing Kunkel in the court case before Schrand, said two dozen more Assumption students are petitioning to join the case.

In its response to Kunkel's claim, the Northern Kentucky Independent District Board of Health argues that the U.S. Supreme Court has given government the power to prevent communicable diseases. State officials, the response said, acted properly in the Assumption case. 

Kunkel has asked for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against the public health officials. Schrand will hear arguments on Monday. He could rule then, or take some time before issuing a decision.

Assumption Academy and its elementary-level Our Lady of the Sacred Heart School operate under the Society of St. Pius X, a conservative Catholic sect that opts for the Latin Mass and resists the Vatican II church reforms.

In early February through March, chickenpox moved through the Assumption Academy student body. Officials from Northern Kentucky Independent District Board of Health urged parents to vaccinate their children against the highly contagious illness.

Though the flu is deadlier, chickenpox can be fatal, especially to infants and pregnant women. People can spread chickenpox for up to three weeks before they develop the telltale itchy rash. Perhaps the only good thing about a bout with chickenpox is that it confers lifelong immunity.

By mid-March, when 32 students became ill, the health department told parents that unless they could show proof of vaccination or immunity, their children would have to stay home until the worst had passed.

Amid the debate in Boone County, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin told a radio program that he had engaged in a practice that doctors reject: He sent his nine children to play with a neighbor child who had chickenpox so the Bevin youngsters would come down with it.