Editor’s note: This commentary is by Michelle Guenard, who spent 20 years as broadcast journalist, producer, writer and editor with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. She now lives in Craftsbury Common. This is the text of a letter she sent to Essex-Orleans Sens. John Rodgers, and Robert Starr, both Democrats.
[T]he current debate about a parent’s right to choose whether to vaccinate their children is reminiscent of a similarly heated debate — a smoker’s right to smoke.
When I was a child smokers had the right to light up anywhere. Airplanes, buses, restaurants, daycares, playgrounds and even doctor’s offices were haloed by a choking blue tobacco haze.
Gently suggesting that people smoke away from children didn’t work. Gently educating them on the health effects of smoking didn’t work.
It seems inconceivable now, but just 15 years ago large tobacco companies were still using bogus medical research to prop up their argument that cigarettes were not addictive. As a CBC reporter I covered part of the Letourneau vs. JTI-Macdonald/Imperial/B&H Inc. class action suit in Montreal. That case only wrapped up last December and a decision is still pending.
Then as now, “personal choice” proponents lobbied governments to protect their right to do what they wanted, when they wanted, where they wanted, how they wanted.
Waiting to vaccinate until the threat hits close to home is like playing Russian Roulette with your child’s health.
Non-smokers launched their own lobbying efforts — a campaign that eventually succeeded in convincing lawmakers that this public health hazard was socially and legally unacceptable.
The health hazard we’re currently facing comes from diseases that will kill children. These “previously eradicated” infections will also kill people in at risk segments of our community — the elderly, the immunocompromised. Most will pull through. Others will face lifelong complications.
It’s hard to think of cigarettes as “low risk” for bystanders but compared to measles, secondhand smoke is benign. An unvaccinated child has a 90 percent chance of getting measles just by walking into a room where an infected person sneezed in the last two hours. And once infected, has a near 100 percent chance of infecting others in the four days before symptoms appear.
Waiting to vaccinate until the threat hits close to home is like playing Russian Roulette with your child’s health. Do we quarantine every child who takes a trip during an outbreak?
I support a two-prong approach. Gentle education by medical workers and public health workers to alleviate fear. And laws that protect the general public from this health hazard.
Smokers can still exercise their right to smoke. They just have to do it away from the general population.
An unvaccinated child is the “lit cigarette” in the classroom and the playground.
Unless their doctors supplies a waiver for sound medical reasons, parents should not be subjecting other children to “their choice.”
