State Setup & Compliance

Everywhere in America

Where a shot record actually gets asked for, and where it does not.

School enrollment

Enrolling a child in a school, public, private or religious, means handing that school an immunization certificate or an exemption, because each state writes its own school rule.

Licensed daycare and preschool

A state's school rule usually reaches licensed child care too, and the word that decides it is licensed. A drop in nursery or a parents day out below the licensing line is usually outside it.

Club and recreation sports

A club asks for age, fees and a sports physical. The playing rules US Youth Soccer publishes carry no immunization condition, and neither do Little League's published eligibility rules. A shot rule turns up when the venue does it: a school gym, a hospital, a licensed camp.

Scouting

Scouting America's annual health form asks for a tetanus shot within the last 10 years, and Scouting America publishes an immunization exemption request form for families who decline.

Summer camp

A camp accredited by the American Camp Association has to collect a health history from every camper, and the association's own guidance says a signed refusal counts as the record.

Dual enrollment

A community college course, and coursework taken online, often sits outside a state's college immunization law. North Carolina and Texas both write that exclusion into their own statutes.

Living on campus

Both of those statutes are written around the student who is on campus full time, so the moment to plan for is the first full time semester on a campus.

Enlisting

Nobody is turned away from enlistment for being unvaccinated. Recruits are immunized by the military in their first days of basic training.

Healthcare training

A nursing or allied health student can be admitted to the program and still be blocked from the clinical hours, because the clinical site, not the college, decides which exemptions it accepts.

Travel abroad

Some countries ask for proof of yellow fever vaccination on an international certificate before letting a traveler in. A doctor can write a medical waiver on that certificate, and the destination country may or may not accept it.

Before any shot, what federal law already gives you

The schedule is a recommendation

The federal schedule guides doctors. It binds a family only where a state legislature has written it into that state's own law.

The sheet before every dose

Federal law says the provider hands over the written benefit and risk sheet before every dose, not only the first one. It is 42 U.S.C. 300aa-26.

Where an injury claim goes

A claim that a vaccine caused an injury goes to a no fault federal program rather than to an ordinary court. The Health Resources and Services Administration runs it.