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Ohio’s new policy forcing healthy, unvaccinated children out of school for 21 to 25 days after a confirmed case of measles or rubella is drawing fire from parents, lawyers and scientists.
Critics say the policy isn’t needed to protect public health, it could harm children and it may be illegal.
The policy, part of a public health order signed in February by Ohio Department of Public Health (ODH) Director Bruce Vanderhoff, is enforceable even if the unvaccinated student shows no signs of illness or infection.
The policy also applies whenever a mumps or chickenpox outbreak occurs — and it extends to sports and extracurricular activities, not just classroom attendance.
The 21-to-25-day quarantine resets every time a new case or outbreak is reported at the student’s school.
Jeffrey Tucker, president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, called the policy “cruel and discriminatory” and a violation of the rights of children and their parents or guardians.
“If the policy is to protect the unvaccinated children, the parents should be the ones to decide,” Tucker said.
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said the “contrast between medical freedom and medical tyranny is blatant” in the policy, which he said “discriminates against people based on medical choice … with zero evidence that they pose a risk.”
Policy could lead to ‘serious risk of vaccine injury’
Ohio’s school vaccine mandates require students to receive routine childhood vaccinations for 10 diseases: diphtheria, hepatitis B, measles, meningococcal, mumps, pertussis (whooping cough), polio, rubella, tetanus and varicella (chickenpox).
Earlier this month, Ohio school districts sent letters to parents warning that children who haven’t received two doses of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine will be “excluded from school” for 21 days whenever the school confirms a measles case.
According to the policy, any vaccine doses children received five or more days before the minimum interval or age are “invalid” — so those students are classified as unvaccinated and required to be re-vaccinated.
That could put those children “at serious risk of vaccine injury,” according to Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom, which called for the “immediate repeal” of the policy.
In a letter to leaders and members of the Ohio Senate and House of Representatives, the group said Ohio’s policy amounts to a “coercion tactic to bully parents into submitting to vaccination against their conscience out of desperation.”
Most families will be unable to find solutions to keep their unvaccinated children at home for several weeks or months, the letter noted.
Leslie Manookian, president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, agreed that the policy appears deliberately designed to “coerce busy parents into vaccinating their children so they won’t be excluded from attending school and any school-related activities.”
However, Manookian questioned whether the policy will change the minds of parents who have chosen not to vaccinate their kids.
“This policy misses a larger point, which is that many parents would prefer to take the risk of their child contracting measles than to subject their child to the potential risk of the measles vaccines,” she said.
Policy violates state law, attorney says
Legal experts also questioned Ohio’s policy. Attorney Greg Glaser, whose practice focuses on constitutional law and the rights of the unvaccinated, called the policy a “clear abuse of administrative power” and an “unjust exclusion of healthy children from their classrooms.”
Glaser said Ohio law recognizes the right of parents and caregivers to exempt their children from vaccine requirements for reasons of conscience, including religious belief.
The same law also explicitly states that schoolchildren can be excluded from school only during a declared “chicken pox epidemic.”
“The state legislature never granted the Department of Health the authority to arbitrarily expand this statute to mandate weeks-long quarantines for healthy children based on isolated reports of measles, mumps or rubella,” Glaser said.
Glaser said parents are “not powerless” against exclusion policies like Ohio’s — they can pressure their local school boards and state elected officials to repeal or change the rules.
“Families facing these illegal quarantines have grounds for civil litigation,” he said. “No unelected health official has the authority to rewrite state law and turn schools into instruments of medical tyranny.”
Is Ohio’s policy scientifically sound?
Experts also questioned the science behind Ohio’s new school vaccination policy. Jablonowski noted that Merck, the manufacturer of the MMR vaccine, has acknowledged that people who receive the MMR vaccine can still acquire and transmit the targeted diseases.
Jablonowski said:
“They are all live vaccines. Every vaccination is a case of the disease, typically asymptomatic cases.
“The package insert for Merck’s MMRV states, ‘transmission of varicella vaccine virus … resulting in varicella infection including disseminated disease may occur between vaccine recipients … and contacts susceptible to varicella including healthy as well as high-risk individuals.’”
According to a systematic review published last month in the peer-reviewed Expert Review of Vaccines, people who were vaccinated against measles can still contract and transmit the virus to others, and in some instances initiate substantial chains of transmission, which can “contribute to outbreaks.”
In 2011, a fully vaccinated person in New York also infected others. In measles outbreaks in Italy between 2017 and 2021, many vaccinated people became infected. The same was true for a 2025 outbreak in Colorado.
“Even if every single child in a school, community or state were vaccinated, that would not stop cases of measles, because the measles vaccine suffers from both primary and secondary vaccine failure,” Manookian said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that the primary failure rate of the MMR vaccine is as high as 7%.
A 2007 CDC study concluded that the immunity provided by the MMR vaccine wanes over time. The study found that 35% of vaccinated 7-year-olds, 60% of vaccinated 15-year-olds and approximately 66% of vaccinated adults can carry measles and infect others even if they don’t have symptoms.
Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom addressed the MMR vaccine’s waning protection in its letter, stating that it’s “absurd to discriminate against healthy unvaccinated children when more than 60% of the teachers are able to carry and spread measles to students.”
In an analysis posted on Substack last week, epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher identified at least three U.S. deaths likely linked to the MMR vaccine this year — compared to no U.S. deaths definitively linked to measles cases.
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Excluding kids from school may increase risk of self-harm
According to CHD Advocacy Director Michael Kane, evidence shows that excluding children from school can lead to their being “branded and scarred as being different and being removed.”
School districts and state health boards haven’t conducted studies on the potential harms of their exclusion policies. However, statistics suggest such policies may be connected to an increased rate of youth suicides in the U.S. in recent years.
Data from the Washington State Department of Children, Youth & Families show a sharp increase in youth suicides during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In Nevada, the Clark County School District, which includes Las Vegas and is the fifth largest district in the U.S., reopened schools to in-person learning in January 2021, after 18 students had committed suicide since the beginning of the pandemic. That was double the number recorded in the district for all of 2019.
According to the New York State Office of Mental Health, suicide is the second-leading cause of death for youth in New York and throughout the U.S.
By contrast, official statistics from Sweden, which didn’t impose lockdowns or school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, show that suicides among young people decreased in 2020 and subsequent years.
In an interview with The Defender last year, Karl Kanthak, who has researched school vaccine exemption regulations and provided written and oral briefings on vaccine exclusion risks to boards of health and education, called school exclusion policies reckless.
Kanthak said there are parallels between students being barred from school attendance because of their vaccination status and students barred from school for disciplinary reasons.
“If anything, it is worse as the student did not break any rules to warrant the action … It is now recognized that some youth will respond to a disciplinary suspension or expulsion with a self-harm attempt,” Kanthak said.
He noted that when barring an unvaccinated child from school, administrators likely don’t know anything about the student’s mental status.
Related articles in The Defender
- Vaccinated People Can and Do Spread Measles, Peer-Reviewed Analysis Finds
- CDC Official: MMR Vaccine Doesn’t Guarantee Protection Against Measles
- Measles Cases Surged 20% Globally But Deaths Declined by 8% — Are More Vaccines the Answer?
- 2 ‘Measles-Associated’ Deaths in Pennsylvania Spark Media Blitz — But Officials Won’t Release Details
- Latest Measles Outbreaks a Result of Failed Vaccines — Not Failure to Vaccinate
- Barring Teens With Medical Exemptions From Classroom Increases Suicide Risk
