The Health Subcommittee advanced seven bills — including measures on open captioning at movie theaters, sickle cell cancer education, nonemergency medical transport fee disclosure, agritourism sewage disposal, food insecurity data collection, and regional emergency communication authorities — while killing a bill that would have removed the hepatitis B vaccine from Virginia's mandatory childhood vaccination schedule, laying it on the table 8-1 after sharp exchanges over vaccine science and remarks the committee called xenophobic.
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Delegate Garrett argued that existing Virginia law requiring testing of pregnant mothers already addresses the primary transmission risk to newborns, and that requiring newborns to receive the hepatitis B vaccine alongside numerous other vaccines 'simply cannot be healthy.' Dr. Ashley Zelinek countered directly, stating that 90% of babies infected at birth with hepatitis B will develop chronic infection and 25% will die prematurely, and that 'no child ever gets 14 to 16 shots in one day.' Delegate Price cited Johns Hopkins data that as many as 9 in 10 infants infected in their first year will develop chronic infection leading to liver failure and death, and that the vaccine prevents infections by 99%. Delegate Downey rebutted Garrett's reliance on maternal screening by noting that universal screening does not exist in the U.S. the way it does in countries like Denmark, which has universal health care.
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“The rub on that, and I think you'll probably hear in the testimony today, is that it's imperfect. It is unreliable. Maybe the batteries aren't charged. Maybe they don't have enough. Maybe the staff isn't trained on it. And so people get turned away. And the better solution, which this bill is all about, is the idea of requiring open captions, which you can sort of see on the screen.”
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Sign in to subscribeThe health and human services health subcommittee will now come to order. Members, please take your seats and please register your attendance on the electronic voting board. All members have voted. There we go. All right. We do have a quorum, so welcome everyone. Before I begin our docket, I want to welcome the American sign language interpreters and closed captioning team. Their presence ensures that our process is open and accessible. Government works best when everyone has a seat at the table. Here we are at the committee level. We're certainly committed to an inclusive environment where barriers to following and participating in our legislative process are removed, and that is a priority for us. So I want to welcome everyone here to this great occasion. I can yield for a quick statement by our chair, Willett, if you'd like to make some opening remarks just very quickly. I'll just completely agree with the chair. This is wonderful to have you here today and making this hearing, which is open to everyone, as accessible as possible. So again, really appreciate the effort and thank delegate Hernandez for helping us to coordinate all this. Thank you. Great. So with that…
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