Where NJ governor hopefuls stand on childhood vaccines

by Lilo H. Stainton, New Jersey Monitor

New Jersey Votes: 2025 In public settings, the leading candidates for governor in New Jersey say they support the state’s current childhood vaccine requirements and believe the state should pursue herd immunity.

But the two differ on the details, with Democrat Mikie Sherrill saying she would follow “vaccine protocol” and Republican Jack Ciattarelli promising to allow more parents to opt out of vaccine requirements for their children.

The two are campaigning to replace a term-limited Gov. Phil Murphy (D) in January as state health officials express alarm about declining immunization rates and a dip in herd immunity, a threshold level of community immune protection sufficient to restrict the spread of disease.

Sherrill, a four-term congresswoman, has promised that if she becomes governor, she would work with other northeastern states that have joined forces to develop their own science-based vaccine guidelines in the wake of federal policy shifts driven by vaccine skepticism in the Trump administration.

When asked during the first gubernatorial debate at Rider University about falling immunization rates nationwide and the rise in infectious diseases like measles, Sherrill said New Jersey parents “should be very worried.”

“These are eminently curable diseases and we are allowing children to get sick and, yes, die because we are not appropriately following medical research and vaccine protocol,” she said.

New Jersey, as the nation’s most densely populated state, is particularly at risk, Sherrill said, since close contact increases the chance of transmission. Nationwide, more than 1,500 measles cases have been diagnosed this year alone — including 10 in New Jersey — and three children have died, two in Texas and one in New Mexico, according to federal data. 

“These are diseases that in my childhood had been pretty much eradicated,” Sherrill told WPIX-TV recently. 

Ciattarelli has also pledged to uphold New Jersey’s current childhood vaccine requirements, or schedule, and said his priority as governor would be to protect public health and safety.

“The rise in things like measles, mumps, and whooping cough and the like is very, very concerning,” Ciattarelli, a former state assemblyman, said at Rider University. “We’ve got to get above the threshold for herd immunity to keep our communities safe.”

But Ciattarelli has also publicly said he would never mandate a vaccine, and last month joined an event hosted by the New Jersey Public Health Innovation Political Action Committee, which opposes mandatory vaccination, where the keynote speaker was a doctor who claimed COVID-19 vaccines can make people magnetic, according to the New York Times.

“Jack will oppose a one-size-fits-all vaccination schedule, support medical and religious exemptions for vaccines, and create a parental rights ombudsman in state government to give parents more of a voice on key issues, including those seeking a philosophical vaccine exemption,” Ciattarelli’s website says. 

Early in-person voting in the gubernatorial race begins October 25. Election Day is November 4. Mail-in ballots are being accepted now.

The front-runners’ campaigns have focused largely on affordability, with Ciattarelli seeking to connect Sherrill to unpopular elements of Murphy’s tenure and Sherrill underscoring Ciattarelli’s support for — and endorsement from — President Trump. But Ciattarelli, who almost defeated Murphy four years ago in a race shaped largely by voters’ feelings about the Murphy administration’s response to the pandemic, has also emphasized parental choice around education, gender identity, and health care. 

Sherrill has said Ciattarelli’s connection to vaccine-skeptics shows he is “taking his cues from fringe activist, conspiracy theorists” whose “extreme policies” will reduce access to vaccines and lead more children to become sick from preventable diseases. 

Ciattarelli told reporters at Kean University recently that parental choice and herd immunity are not in opposition. Communities would still be sufficiently protected even if families have more ways to opt out of childhood immunizations, he said, since the majority currently comply with the state immunization requirements. 

“Considering how many parents still vaccinate their children according to the current recommended schedule, I don’t think herd immunity is an issue here,” Ciattarelli said.

Guidelines for the use of vaccines are shaped by various federal bodies, but states control their own immunization schedules, a mix of recommendations and requirements that dictate what shots are given to newborns and what is needed to attend public school or child care. New Jersey requires children attending K-12 schools to get seven vaccinations — including the MMR, which targets measles, mumps, and rubella, and influenza — some involving multiple doses over several years. COVID-19 shots are not mandated for school. 

Immunization levels have declined in New Jersey and other states in recent years as concerns about the COVID-19 vaccines have elevated the voices of longstanding vaccine skeptics, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who Trump tapped to lead federal health programs. Last school year, 91% of the nearly 497,000 K-6 pupils in all New Jersey schools were fully vaccinated, according to state data, down from 94% in 2019-2020,when more than 520,400 K-6 students were enrolled. Interest in COVID-19 shots here and elsewhere has waned significantly since the pandemic.

Herd immunity varies depending on the disease, but Dr. Kaitlan Baston, a former commissioner at the New Jersey Department of Health, warned state lawmakers in April that all counties in the Garden State had dipped below the needed threshold — 95% — to block measles transmission. The rate has also declined nationwide, federal data shows, so that 93% of kindergarteners were immunized against measles last school year, leaving some 286,000 youngsters unvaccinated. 

Baston said state officials need to work with medical providers and local health leaders to make sure families have accurate information about the risks and benefits of vaccination. Immunizations have saved 150 million lives globally over the past five decades, according to the World Health Organization. COVID-19 vaccines saved between 14 and 20 million people worldwide in the first year they were available, a study by the National Institutes of Health found. 

New Jersey health officials have continued to encourage people to get vaccinated, with recent campaigns highlighting the risk of seasonal respiratory illness and reminding people that measles is a preventable disease. The health department has also ordered pharmacists to offer COVID-19 vaccines to anyone older than 6 months — the minimum age for which they’ve been approved — regardless of federal guidance. State insurance officials are calling on insurance companies to cover the cost. 

Dr. Eddy Bresnitz, a vaccine expert and former state epidemiologist, said herd immunity or community protection is “not a single entity,” but varies depending on the disease. Measles is highly infectious, increasing the need for more people to be vaccinated in order to protect those who have health risks that prevent them from getting certain shots. Public health measures like keeping children home from school when sick, wearing masks, and regular hand washing also impact how a disease spreads, he said. 

Vaccine requirements “are not just about protecting children in the school setting. It’s also about protecting adults,” including teachers and administrators who are not able to be immunized themselves, Bresnitz said. The same principle applies in the wider community, he said. 

All states permit children who have immune disorders or cannot be vaccinated for other medical reasons to be exempted from these requirements. Like most states, New Jersey also allows for religious exemptions, a category that has become more popular in recent years. In 2019-2020, 3% of pupils opted out of immunizations for religious reasons; by last year, religious exemptions had risen to 5%, state data shows.

While most parents still support vaccination, Bresnitz — who lives in Pennsylvania — said adding another option for exemptions, as Ciattarelli proposes, inevitably increases the pool of unprotected children.

“The easier you make it for parents and caregivers to exempt their children” from the vaccine schedule, “the more likely it will put the community at risk,” he said. 

Ciattarelli has said that parent advocates want a process that provides them more information before they consent to shots for their children, along with options to “spread out” the vaccine schedule. The number of shots babies must get is “of great concern to a great number of parents across the state,” he said.

“The schedule is very different today than when my kids were children, and when I was a kid,” he said. 

Vaccine skeptics emerged as a political force here in late 2019, when Democratic leaders in the Legislature sought to limit New Jersey’s religious exemption, claiming it was being misused.

Thousands of people, including many families with children, converged on Trenton for one of the largest, loudest Statehouse protests in recent times.

Even Kennedy, founder of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, made an appearance. Democrats abandoned the reform effort, which has not resurfaced since.