A Public Responsibility to Immunize Your Child

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A Public Responsibility to Immunize Your Child

With the latest outbreak of measles, there is lots of talk about mandatory vaccinations and parents’ rights in determining whether or not their children get vaccinated or not. It seems vaccinations boils down to two different questions:

Should Parents have the Right to Opt Out of Mandatory Vaccinations

Politicians, recognizing a potent political issue, have not been very helpful in shedding light on the legal issue. For example, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul recently said “The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children and it [vaccinations] is an issue of freedom and public health.” Aside from reaffirming who “owns” children, it could mean anything. Governor Chris Christie, another potential in the race for the Presidency in 2016, was less ambiguous, saying that immunizations are “a matter of personal choice”. The Supreme Court seems to differ.

The Constitution lays out a structure of government that reinforces our unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. However, these rights have always been tempered with the responsibility not to interfere with others’ unalienable rights. For example, my right to free speech does not extend to the freedom to falsely yell “Fire” in a crowded movie theater, an action that could result in panic and injuries to the others. We do not live in a vacuum. The Constitution was not written about the lives of individuals, but the lives we share in community. If we lived lives of isolation, there would be no need for a Constitution, individual rights, or laws.

The Supreme Court addressed this issue specifically when it ruled over a hundred years ago that the freedom of the individual must sometimes be subordinated to the common welfare and the community’s right to protect itself from disease. While there is no Federal law regarding mandatory vaccinations for children, all fifty states have existing statutes requiring inoculation with a variety of religious and health exemptions. One state’s program, New York’s compulsory vaccination requirements for public school children, was affirmed earlier this year by a Federal court.

In California where the latest measles outbreak has been reported, parents can opt out simply by filling out a form. This has led to pockets of high numbers of non-vaccinated children in certain communities. For instance, 6.5% of the children entering kindergarten in Marin County have been opted out of vaccinations by parents using personal exemptions.

Bottom line: States can require mandatory vaccinations while allowing exemptions for religious or medical reasons (as defined by each state).

The factual question: How safe are vaccinations?

In recent years, many anti-vaccinations proponents have claimed a causal link between vaccines and autism, primarily as the result of a now-discredited study by British physician Andrew Wakefield. Even so, parents remain wary especially when public officials like Senator Paul, an ophthalmologist, say things on TV like,”I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.” When these remarks came under fire for lacking validity, the Senator later clarified his comment in a statement: “I did not say vaccines caused disorders, just that they were temporally related—I did not allege causation. I support vaccines, I receive them myself and I had all of my children vaccinated.”

Medical and public health organization agree: there is no link between vaccinations and autism. As the father of an autistic son, I understand a parent’s fear of autism. I have shared their frantic search for an answer as to why their child is afflicted and other children are not. I too have spent night after night, unable to sleep wondering what I had done or not done that affected my child so adversely. I still search for answers, but I am certain that his childhood immunizations were not the cause.

Another concern of parents is that some people and children may have an allergic or adverse reaction (anaphylaxis) to vaccine ingredients. While adverse reaction is possible, it is also highly unlikely. The Centers for Disease Control reports about 30,000 cases annually—approximately one per million vaccinations—of which 3,500 are classified as “serious”. By contrast, common aspirin is a thousand times more likely to cause an adverse reaction than the typical vaccine (1200 cases per million exposures).

Some opponents to vaccinations claim that the ingredients within vaccines are harmful including thimersol, formaldehyde, and aluminum. However, they overlook the fact that the suspicious substances have either been removed or reduced to trace amounts from all vaccines in recent years. Today, the typical child is exposed to more bacteria, viruses, toxins, and other harmful substances in a single day of normal activity than are found in vaccines.

Every major medical organization including the Centers for Disease Control. The Food and Drug Administration, Institute of Medicine, American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Academy of Family Physicians confirm “vaccines are safe.”

Finally, vaccinations save children’s lives. In the last ten years alone, the CDC estimates that 732,000 American children were saved from death, and 322 million cases of illness were prevented. Measles cases have dropped by 74%, smallpox and polio have almost disappeared in the United States while deaths from measles, mumps, rubella, and Hib have been reduced 99% by vaccinations.

Bottomline: Vaccinations do a lot more good than harm.