Editor’s note: This commentary is by Sandy Reider, MD, who is the medical adviser to the Vermont Coalition for Vaccine Choice. He lives in Lyndonville.
[B]y now most have heard that last week the Vermont Senate, circumventing normal legislative due process and eliminating any and all public debate, attached, and passed 18-11, a last minute amendment to House bill H.98 ( a medical registry bill). This amendment proposes to eliminate the basic right of parents to decide which, if any, vaccinations their child should receive prior to entering state-funded day care or school.
In doing so, not only has the Senate demonstrated utter disregard for the basic human right of voluntary consent to medical treatment, it also revealed a callous indifference toward families whose lives will be disrupted, and toward small schools which are bound to lose enrollment when some young families elect to homeschool their children, or move out of state altogether, should this measure pass.
Even without considering the medical harm that would result from removing choice, the injection of force or coercion into the doctor-patient relationship will inevitably undermine trust, which must be an unspoken given when anyone visits their doctor for help and healing.
I do not know about the ethical guidelines for the American Academy of Pediatrics, but the AMA does recognize the right of physicians to religious and philosophical exemptions. A 2012 survey of pediatricians about attitudes toward immunizations for their own children revealed that starting in 2009, a significant number were planning to diverge from the CDC recommended vaccine schedule, citing safety, and lack of need for certain vaccines, as factors.
It has become clear to me that the current superficial, thoroughly inadequate debate about vaccine policy in the Statehouse, and indeed throughout the country, is not so much about science, but fear. Facts do not seem to matter.
Even without considering the medical harm that would result from removing choice, the injection of force or coercion into the doctor-patient relationship will inevitably undermine trust, which must be an unspoken given when anyone visits their doctor for help and healing.
1. Hepatitis B, like HIV, does not spread in a community setting, especially among schoolchildren, who are unlikely to be engaging in sex or IV drug use. If children who are carrying hepatitis B (or HIV) are allowed in school, what can be the justification for denying a child, who has not had the required course of HepB vaccination, entry to school? Somebody, please explain that to me.
2. Diphtheria, not seen in Vermont for many decades, is intended to neutralize the diphtheria toxin, but does nothing to prevent infection and transmission to others. A vaccinated child can infect others just as easily as a child who is not vaccinated. Tetanus is not a communicable disease, and like diphtheria, is for personal protection only.
3. We now know that the outbreaks of whooping cough here and elsewhere in 2012 were the result of vaccine failure, not unvaccinated schoolchildren, though they are still widely scapegoated in the media. If you doubt this, ask our own health department or the CDC.
4. The current inactivated polio virus does protect the individual, but does not prevent colonization of the intestines by polio virus, so that vaccinated, like unvaccinated individuals, may carry the wild virus and infect contacts.
5. Measles, and more lately chickenpox, became diseases to be feared here in the U.S. only after vaccines for each were introduced.
6. Vermont recently purchased 25,000 doses of influenza vaccine containing 25 mcg. per dose of ethylmercury, to be given to children and pregnant women.
Safety issues aside, and with Vermont’s vaccination rates for required individual vaccines in first-graders at all time highs, I sincerely hope that when this bill reaches the House, our representatives will, once again, see it for what it is, an unwarranted intrusion into the lives of Vermonters, and into the relationship between patients and doctors.
