Vaccine requirement’s return restores hope for mother who lost son to meningitis

Gail Bailey stands at the tombstone for her son, Eddy, who died of bacterial meningitis in 2002. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)

It has been nearly 22 years since Edward “Eddy” Bailey — a fit, 6-foot 4-inch college junior — died 16 hours after complaining that he felt ill. “But I think about it every day,” says his mother, Gail Bailey.

The younger of her two sons, Eddy died of bacterial meningitis. His death set his mother on a crusade to add the meningitis vaccine to the list of inoculations that everyone is required to get when they go to school.

“When you lose your child, you visit Hell for a long time,” Bailey says. “It’s just such an insidious disease.”

The year after his death, she won a partial victory — watered-down legislation requiring colleges to provide educational materials about the illness and to record whether students had the vaccine or not.

This week, though, she got a resounding follow-up: The state health department reinstituted a mandatory meningitis vaccine for students entering seventh and 12th grades. For Bailey, who lives in Jefferson, it was a long time in coming.

Eddy Bailey was the valedictorian at his high school in Jefferson and got a full scholarship at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he majored in finance and economics.

“He had a real gift for numbers and math,” his mother says. Tall and energetic, he was also gentle and kind.

“Anybody that was hurting, he would help,” Bailey says. “At his wake, all these girls came up and said, ‘We would have never passed algebra without Eddy!’” She pauses and tears creep into her voice. “We never knew that.”

‘The worst day of our lives’

Bailey wrote an account of her son’s life on a website for the Meningitis Foundation of Canada.

On about 4 p.m. on a Monday afternoon in November 2002, Eddy felt feverish and thought he was coming down with the flu. At 7 o’clock the next morning, he woke up and had trouble breathing. His college roommate called 911.

Eddy collapsed before the emergency medical technicians arrived. They took him to the emergency room at Meriter Hospital in Madison, just blocks from where he lived. He was pronounced dead at 8:02 a.m.

Gail was at her job, teaching business at Madison College’s Watertown Campus. Her husband, Phillip, a food scientist, was at work at a meatpacking plant. Local police officers were dispatched to tell each of them about Eddy’s death.

“It was the worst day of our lives,” Gail Bailey says.

According to Dr. Frank Zhu, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Medical College of Wisconsin, bacterial meningitis surfaces mostly in teens and young adults. But it’s hard to say whether age is the reason, or a matter of coincidence.

“In outbreaks that have happened, they’re most commonly in very cramped living conditions, for example dorms or barracks in the military,” says Zhu, who is also medical director for infection control and prevention at Children’s Wisconsin, a Milwaukee pediatric hospital.

Late adolescence “coincides with the time where you’re often going to be living and moving into close proximity — going to college or going to the military,” he says. And it’s also a phase of life when people may tend to congregate in larger groups socially.

From grief to a crusade

Until Eddy’s death, neither Gail Bailey nor her husband knew much about meningitis, or that there was a vaccine against some forms of the bacteria responsible.

Eddy and his older brother, Brett, “had every vaccine that was required,” Bailey says — but no one mentioned that a meningitis vaccine was available. She also hadn’t heard about outbreaks that occurred from time to time and seemed to cluster in college dorms.

She learned of other parents who had lost children to the illness. And as she learned more, she spent the next year lobbying for a state law that she hoped would save the lives of countless others. 

“I was like, if I do anything with my life, I have to help these kids,” Bailey says.

As originally drafted the bill would have required all public and private college students in Wisconsin to have a meningitis vaccine.

“I probably worked on it for a year and went up to the Capitol and went to a lot of committee meetings and everything,” Bailey says. Some legislators were encouraging and supportive, she says, but others struck her as callous and indifferent. 

Hearing records from the bill showed enthusiastic support, especially from family members who had lost loved ones to meningitis. But they also showed resistance to the vaccine requirement, both from higher education officials and the insurance industry.

A series of amendments weakened the bill. The first one replaced the vaccine requirement entirely, requiring colleges and universities to “provide detailed information on the risks associated with meningococcal disease and the availability and effectiveness of vaccines against the disease to each student.”

A second amendment added a requirement that colleges and universities maintain records showing whether or not students living on campus have been vaccinated against meningitis and hepatitis B and the vaccine date if they have — but not requiring either vaccination.

“We really wanted a lot more than that,” Bailey says. As the bill was being watered down, she thought of her older son, Brett, who had come home from U.S. Army boot camp for his younger brother’s funeral that previous November. Brett went on to serve 20 years in the Army, including in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Eliminating the vaccine requirement, Bailey says, “would be like sending Brett out on the front lines against the Taliban with a pellet gun and saying, ‘Good luck!’”

More comprehensive meningitis vaccines have been developed since then. Zhu of the Medical College of Wisconsin says that the primary vaccine recommended today, which is included among required school-related vaccines in many states, came into use after 2005.

In the years that followed the passage of the first bill, Gail Bailey has paid attention to developments in the vaccine and stayed in touch with other parents who have lost children to the illness. The family established a scholarship in Eddy’s memory.

“Finally I came to the realization that I can’t depend on lawmakers,” she says. “I have to depend on my family and friends.”

Requirement blocked, then revived

In 2023 the Legislature’s Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules voted on party lines to block the state Department of Health Services (DHS) from updating vaccine requirements. The update included new meningitis vaccine requirements recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Bailey wrote an angry letter to the editor of the local paper.

She was further upset when she saw that Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) chaired the rules committee. Back when she first pursued legislation after Eddy died, she sought support from Nass, then an Assembly member whose district included Jefferson.

“He was no help,” Bailey says. She recalls being told that mandates were out of the question and would lack support. “They just didn’t care.”

Nass did not respond Wednesday to a request to his office for comment. On Thursday, after this article was published, Nass’ chief of staff, Mike Mikalson, replied in a lengthy email message recounting the history of the 2003 law.

Mikalson wrote that opposition centered on concerns that the bill was seen as part of a campaign by a French vaccine manufacturer “to aggressively seek state-by-state government mandates for its product, bypassing the normal process for states to add mandated vaccines to each state’s list.”

The bill as it was originally written was not supported by the Wisconsin health department (the Department of Health and Family Services at the time), and opposition in the Legislature was organized by both Nass, a Republican, and then-State Rep. Mark Pocan, a Democrat, Mikalson wrote.

Eddy Bailey’s body is buried in Greenwood Cemetery on the edge of town, with a monument that stands as high as he was tall. Designed by Gail’s brother, Patrick Gauthier, it’s topped with an oversize representation of a king chess piece, because he started a school chess club. It has other features that recall her son’s life and loves — a book, because he was a voracious reader, a depiction of shorts, his favorite everyday garment, and more details besides.

This Friday will mark Eddy’s birthday. He would be 42.

Until the news this week that DHS was reinstating the blocked rule, because the Legislature has adjourned for the year, Bailey says he didn’t realize it would be possible to restore the requirement. It was a welcome revival.

“I’m 70 now and I don’t have the reserves that I used to,” she says. “But I’ll never stop one way or another. Somebody’s got to speak out. Somebody’s got to be relentless.”

This article was updated Thursday, 5/23/2024, with a response from the office of Sen. Steve Nass.

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