This story was published with the assistance of the Journalism & Women Symposium (JAWS) Health Journalism Fellowship, supported by The Commonwealth Fund.
She doesn’t remember where it began – Facebook, maybe. But she remembers the fear.
A decade ago, the West Virginia woman was pregnant with her first child when a documentary about the dangers of vaccines caught her eye.
“As a mom, you’re wanting to do the best for your kids,” she said. She requested anonymity to discuss her personal views.
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She started to do her own research on vaccines. The woman began to worry: How well were vaccines studied? Were her gut health issues caused by the shots? Could her kids be next?
Then she fully vaccinated all three of her children.
Children in West Virginia must be vaccinated against ten diseases to attend public school: diphtheria, meningitis, whooping cough, tetanus, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox and hepatitis B. Unlike in other states, there are almost no exceptions.
Those policies have made a difference. The vaccination rate among West Virginia’s kindergarteners is around 98%, well above the national average. And as measles continues to spread across the U.S., threatening the country’s disease elimination status, only one person in West Virginia has been diagnosed with measles since 2009.
In a time when vaccination rates are declining in the United States and Americans – largely Republicans — are becoming less confident that approved vaccines are safe for kids, West Virginia remains an exception.
That’s despite a concerted effort from the Make America Healthy Again movement to change the deeply red state’s strong vaccination requirements.
The state does not allow religious or personal exemptions to vaccination requirements for children who wish to attend public school. (Private and parochial schools make their own policies, but fewer than 5% of West Virginia’s children attend these schools.) The policy makes West Virginia an outlier – it’s the only state that’s never allowed non-medical exemptions.
The Republican speaker of the West Virginia House of Delegates, Roger Hanshaw, says the state’s vaccine laws are unlikely to change.
“We have to leave room for the fact that the public health situation in Maine is different than southwest Arizona, right? So I think it is appropriate for state legislatures to make those decisions,” Hanshaw told NOTUS at a February conference hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Robert F. Kennedy’s ascension to the top of the Department of Health and Human Services and the establishment of the MAHA movement on the national stage has resulted in the federal government cutting back the immunization schedule for children and drastically reducing its pro-vaccination messaging.
But states are ultimately responsible for which vaccines they require children to receive. That’s where MAHA’s vaccine agenda can really take hold — or completely fall flat.
In January 2025, West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey, a close affiliate of Kennedy’s, attempted to take the vaccine question into his own hands. He signed an executive order to allow religious and personal exemptions to the school vaccine requirements. The West Virginia Board of Education voted unanimously to disregard the governor’s order. The case is now before the West Virginia Supreme Court.
Also in 2025, a bill introduced in the West Virginia state legislature would have allowed parents to apply for religious exemptions to getting their children vaccinated before attending school. Despite a Republican supermajority, the House of Delegates rejected the bill; one Republican who championed the bill later resigned from a leadership position with the Senate health committee and said she didn’t plan on re-introducing the bill in a later legislative session.
“I think West Virginians understand on both sides of the aisle, because it was Republicans who were so helpful in preserving our law,” said Robin Godfrey, an attorney and political activist in Charleston, West Virginia.
“This is one of the things West Virginia does best in the country,” said Godfrey, who organized against the bill. “Why would we want to give that up?”
Polling in West Virginia has consistently shown widespread support for its school vaccination requirements. But anti-vax die-hards who make up Kennedy’s inner circle are still gunning to take control of vaccine policy at the state level.
In January, a group of MAHA-affiliated organizations founded the Medical Freedom Act Coalition and began working with representatives in nearly two dozen states to advance bills that would roll back vaccine requirements, STAT News reported. The organization has endorsed candidates for the state legislature in West Virginia and published a voter guide to West Virginia’s 2026 primary election.
And the movement has some powerful friends in the state. Besides attempting to unilaterally change West Virginia’s vaccine laws, Morrisey has embraced many of Kennedy’s policies, including restricting Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program purchases and banning certain food dyes, as well as pioneering his own initiatives such as “The Mountaineer Mile,” a program encouraging West Virginians to walk a mile each day.
West Virginia parents who don’t want to vaccinate their kids don’t have to send them to public schools. The state’s homeschooling infrastructure has been expanded in recent years to better accommodate those parents.
“If you’re a parent – I’m a parent, I have two children in the public schools – if you don’t want your children to be vaccinated for whatever personal reason that’s unique to you, you have the chance to make other arrangements,” Hanshaw said.
The West Virginia mother who spoke to NOTUS said she considered that, but ultimately decided against it; homeschooling didn’t work for her family.
Matthew Christiansen, who served as the West Virginia state health officer through December 2024, said that was exactly how the law was supposed to work.
“There are options for families” like homeschooling, alternative schools and delaying the immunization schedules, Christiansen said.
But ultimately, he said, “It’s very, very, very rare that a family comes out on the side of not agreeing that vaccines are the best thing for their kids.”
The pro-vaccine culture has remained strong in West Virginia — so much so that rallying against vaccines in the local arena can look very different than on the national stage. The West Virginia mother who is skeptical of vaccines said she learned the hard way to keep her views to herself.
“I have been pushed out of groups,” she said. “It’s just one of those things that I don’t feel like people can truly feel OK with talking about here.”
In the meantime, seven more bills targeting the school vaccine requirements were introduced during the 2026 West Virginia legislative session, which ended last month. One would have done away with the requirements entirely. They all failed.
Jessie Ice, a Morgantown parent who heads the West Virginia chapter of Families for Vaccines, said she wasn’t surprised.
“I think committee members recognized that this is not popular with the people,” Ice said. “The people don’t want this. The medical community doesn’t want this. The schools don’t want this.”
The mother who reluctantly vaccinated her children wanted it. It was too late for it to matter, but if West Virginia had required fewer vaccines, would her children have gotten only those shots?
“One thousand percent yes,” she said.
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