Should parents be allowed to opt out of vaccinating their kids?
http://www.insightmag.com/archive/200003317.shtml
Parents do not want their children to be injured
or die from a disease or a vaccination. As guardians of their children until those
children are old enough to make life-and-death decisions for themselves, parents take very
seriously the responsibility of making informed vaccination decisions for the children
they love. That responsibility includes becoming educated about the relative risks of
diseases when compared to the vaccines aimed at preventing them.
Like every encounter with a viral or bacterial
infection, every vaccine containing lab-altered viruses or bacteria has an inherent
ability to cause injury or even death. Vaccination either can produce immunity without
incident or can result in mild to severe brain and immune-system damage, depending upon
the vaccine or combination of vaccines given, the health of the person at the time of
vaccination and whether the individual is genetically or otherwise biologically at risk
for developing complications.
The fact that vaccines can cause injury and
death officially was acknowledged in the United States in 1986 when Congress passed the
National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, creating a no-fault federal compensation system for
vaccine-injured children to protect the vaccine manufacturers and doctors from
personal-injury lawsuits. Since then, the system has paid out more than $1 billion to
1,000 families, whose loved ones have died or been harmed by vaccines, even though three
out of four applicants are turned away.
Since 1990, between 12,000 and 14,000 reports of
hospitalizations, injuries and deaths following vaccination are made to the federal
Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, annually, but it is estimated that only
between 1 and 10 percent of all doctors make reports to VAERS. Therefore, the number of
vaccine-related health problems occurring in the United States every year may be more than
1 million.
In the late 1980s, the Institute of Medicine, or
IOM, and the National Academy of Sciences convened committees of physicians to study
existing medical knowledge about vaccines and, in 1991 and 1994, IOM issued historic
reports confirming vaccines can cause death, as well as a wide spectrum of brain and
immune-system damage. But the most important conclusion, which deserves greater public
attention and congressional action, was: “The lack of adequate data regarding many of
the [vaccine] adverse events under study was of major concern to the committee. [T]he
committee encountered many gaps and limitations in knowledge bearing directly or
indirectly on the safety of vaccines.”
Because so little medical research has been
conducted on vaccine side effects, no tests have been developed to identify and screen out
vulnerable children. As a result, public-health officials have taken a “one-size-fits-all”
approach and have aggressively implemented mandatory vaccination laws while dismissing
children who are injured or die after vaccination as unfortunate but necessary sacrifices
“for the greater good.” This utilitarian rationale is of little comfort to the
growing number of mothers and fathers who watch their once-healthy, bright children get
vaccinated and then suddenly descend into mental retardation, epilepsy, learning and
behavior disorders, autism, diabetes, arthritis and asthma. Some adverse reactions are
fatal.
As vaccination rates have approached 98 percent
for children entering kindergarten in many states, there is no question that mass
vaccination in the last quarter-century has suppressed infectious diseases in childhood,
eradicating polio in the Western hemisphere and lowering the number of cases of measles
from a high of more than 400,000 cases in 1965 to only 100 in 1999. Yet, even as
infectious-disease rates have fallen, rates of chronic disease and disability among
children and young adults have risen dramatically.
A University of California study published by
the U.S. Department of Education in 1996 found that “the proportion of the U.S.
population with disabilities has risen markedly during the last quarter-century. [T]his
recent change seems to be due not to demographics, but to greater numbers of children and
young adults reported as having disabilities.” The study concluded the change was due
to “increases in the prevalence of asthma, mental disorders (including
attention-deficit disorder), mental retardation and learning disabilities that have been
noted among children in recent years.”
Instead of epidemics of measles and polio, we
have epidemics of chronic autoimmune and neurological disease: In the last 20 years rates
of asthma and attention-deficit disorder have doubled, diabetes and learning disabilities
have tripled, chronic arthritis now affects nearly one in five Americans and autism has
increased by 300 percent or more in many states. The larger unanswered question is: To
what extent has the administration of multiple doses of multiple vaccines in early
childhood — when the body’s brain and immune system is developing at its most
rapid rate — been a cofactor in epidemics of chronic disease? The assumption
mass-vaccination policies have played no role is as unscientific and dangerous as the
assumption that an individual child’s health problems following vaccination are only
coincidentally related to the vaccination.
Questions about vaccination only can be answered
by scientific research into the biological mechanism of vaccine injury and death so that
pathological profiles can be developed to distinguish between vaccine-induced health
problems and those that are not. Whether the gaps in scientific knowledge about vaccines
will be filled in this decade or remain unanswered in the next depends upon the funding
and research priorities set by Congress, the National Institutes of Health and industry.
With the understanding that medical science and
the doctors who practice it are not infallible, today’s better-educated health-care
consumer is demanding more information, more choices and a more equal decision-making
partnership with doctors. Young mothers, who are told that their children must be injected
with 33 doses of 10 different vaccines before the age of 5, are asking questions such as:
“Why does my 12-hour-old newborn infant have to be injected with hepatitis B vaccine
when I am not infected with hepatitis B and my infant is not an IV-drug user or engaging
in sex with multiple partners — the two highest risk groups for hepatitis B
infection?” And: “Why does my 12-month-old have to get chicken-pox vaccine when
chicken pox is a mild disease and once my child gets it he or she will be immune for life?”
Informed parents know that hepatitis B is not
like polio and that chicken pox is not like smallpox. They know the difference between
taking a risk with a vaccine for an adult disease that is hard to catch, such as the
blood-transmitted hepatitis B, and using a vaccine to prevent a devastating, highly
contagious childhood disease such as polio.
All diseases and all vaccines are not the same
and neither are children. Parents understand the qualitative difference between options
freely taken and punishing dictates. They are calling for enlightened, humane
implementation of state vaccination laws, including insertion of informed-consent
protections that strengthen exemptions for sincerely held religious or conscientious
beliefs. This is especially critical for parents with reason to believe that their child
may be at high risk for dying or being injured by one or more vaccines but cannot find a
doctor to write an exemption.
Informed consent has been the gold standard in
the ethical practice of medicine since World War II, acknowledging the human right for
individuals or their guardians to make fully informed, voluntary decisions about whether
to undergo a medical procedure that could result in harm or death. To the extent that
vaccination has been exempted from informed-consent protections and vaccine makers and
doctors have been exempted from liability for vaccine injuries and deaths, the notion that
a minority of individuals are expendable in service to the majority has prevented a real
commitment of will and resources to develop ways to screen out vulnerable children and
spare their lives. It is not difficult to understand why some parents resist offering up
their children as sacrifices for a government policy that lacks scientific and moral
integrity.
But even as educated health-care consumers are
asking for more information and choices, mechanisms are being set up to restrict those
choices. Government-operated, electronic vaccine-tracking systems already are in place in
most states, using health-care identifier numbers to tag and track children without the
parent’s informed consent in order to enforce use of all government-recommended
vaccines now and in the future. Health-maintenance organizations are turning down children
for health insurance and federal entitlement programs are economically punishing parents
who cannot show proof their child got every state-recommended vaccine. Even children who
have suffered severe vaccine reactions are being pressured to get revaccinated or be
barred from getting an education.
Drug companies and federal agencies are
developing more than 200 new vaccines, including ones for gonorrhea and herpes that will
target 12-year-olds. On March 2, President Clinton joined with the international
pharmaceutical industry, multinational banks and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to
launch the Millennium Vaccine Initiative with several billion dollars committed to
vaccinating all children in the world with existing and future vaccines, including those
in accelerated development for AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
With so many unanswered questions about the
safety and necessity of giving so many vaccines to children, the right to informed consent
to vaccination takes on even greater legal and ethical significance as we head into the
21st century. In a broader sense, the concept of informed consent transcends medicine and
addresses the constitutional concept of individual freedom and the moral concept of
individual inviolability. If the state can tag, track down and force individuals into
being injected with biological agents of unknown toxicity today, will there be any limit
on what individual freedoms the state can take away in the name of the greater good
tomorrow?
Parents, who know and love their children better
than anyone else, have the right to make informed, voluntary vaccination decisions for
their children without facing state-sanctioned punishment. Whether a child is hurt by a
vaccine or a disease, it is the mother and father — not the pediatrician, vaccine
maker or public-health official — who will bear the lifelong grief and burden of what
happens to that child.
Fisher is coauthor of DPT: A Shot in the
Dark, and cofounder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center in Vienna,
Va., a nonprofit organization.
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