Ontario Parents Refusing To Vaccinate Their Children Could Be Forced to Take Science Class (qz.com)

Ontario is considering making parents who choose to not vaccinate their children for non-medical reasons take a science class. The health ministry of Canada's most populous province has proposed a bill which would force those parents sit through the education session before applying for a vaccine exemption. In the class, they will be taught about the importance of vaccination for their children. Quartz offers more context: Ontario was the first province in Canada to introduce immunization laws (PDF) in 1982, which required children attending school be vaccinated against certain diseases -- including diphtheria, tetanus, polio, and measles -- unless they have a signed exemption. After routine immunization was introduced, cases of those diseases dramatically reduced. Parents who apply for an exemption (PDF) for non-medical reasons risk having their child pulled from school if there's an outbreak, or the immediate risk of an outbreak, of a designated disease.

Comments

Re:Should Be...

[MightyMartian]

The courts do it for more immediately necessary medical therapies. Coming from a Jehovah's Witness background (an atheist now for over thirty years), I do remember as a kid all the whackos praying and flailing about because a judge forced a little JW kid to have a blood transfusion over the objection of the righteous parents. I suspect in many hospitals, as soon as they found a JW minor was admitted, they had the lawyers on standby.

While immunization doesn't have the urgency of a blood transfusion, it still represents a significant personal and public health risk to have people not vaccinating their kids, so yes, I think, whether it is "helpful" or not, there should be clear limits on the medical interventions that parents can have the power to deny their children. Children are not possessions, they are not slaves, and where any guardian abuses their powers over a child, I see no problem with social workers, doctors and the courts intervening to make sure the child's medical needs are dealt with.

Re:Won't Work

[lister king of smeg]

Good thing they didn't make Christopher Columbus sit through science classes explaining how flat the earth was before they let him sail on his voyage of discovery. If they made him sit through 'science' classes explaining what all the smart people of the day thought they knew, it's possible that we'd all still be in Europe.

Actually no one thought the earth was flat for thousands of years before columbus, the ancient Greeks figured it out (along with the approximate circumference of the earth)t back in the BC's. The flat earth non-since was a 19th century revisionism.