Forced vaccinations?

As you may remember, I am currently studying paediatrics.

Today we (the students) had to do some presentations on ethical issues we have come across while doing paediatrics.

One of the cases that was presented was of a little 4 year old girl.

I actually saw her a few weeks ago in the child development centre. She has spastic cerebral palsy, meaning that her arms & legs were very stiff and she had great difficulty moving them. She had bilateral leg braces on and walked with a special walking frame on wheels.
She also had very poor fine motor control of her fingers and couldn't really grip anything with her fingers (she could only do a palm grip, like babies under 6months).

She was also totally mute and couldn't say a word, and she is also developmentally delayed with her comprehension as well.

She was born healthy and happy, the 5th of 6 children; and neither her nor any of her siblings had and health or developmental concerns.

Anyway, about a year and a half ago she caught meningitis and got it very very badly; she was in a coma, hospitalised for about a month, and suffered irreversible brain damage.

Which is why she is this way now.


For me, the worst part of this tale is the fact that she got Meningitis C, which is basically the only type of meningitis that can be vaccinated against.

But she wasn't vaccinated.

Her parents had rejected all vaccinations for her and her 5 siblings. I'm not totally sure why, but something like they didn't believe in artifical medication, and wanted only 'natural' living and thought vaccinations were dangerous and unhealthy.


So this case was presented in our seminar today and we all had a talk about whether children should be forcibly vaccinated, even if it goes against the parent's wishes.

In law, a parent does have authority to say what treatment they want for their children...but as long as what they want is in the child's best interests and promotes the welfare of the child.


Because vaccination against very serious diseases does significantly decrease a person's risk of catching a disease, it can be argued that vaccination therefore does promote the welfare of the child

But in addition to this, not only do vaccinations prevent the vaccinated person themselves from getting the disease, but they also lead to 'herd immunity' -- meaning that the level of the disease in the entire community goes down, and so everyone else in the community is protected too.

Our doctor was telling us that since the vaccination against streptococcus pneumonia (the bug that can cause pneumonia and also another type of meningits) has become avaliable for children in England, the number of deaths of elderly people from this bug has also gone down.

So even if some vaccines are 100% effective, if everyone is a community is vaccinated, this will reduce the overall level of the diseases, and be better for everyone.

So if people stop taking up vaccinations, then the level of the disease in the whole population will increase, putting everyone at more risk.
This could be another argument is favour of forcibly vaccinating everyone, because it promotes population health.
'your choice tp not vaccinate your children, could put my children's health at risk.'


I know it may sound harsh, but a number of countries have actually run forced vaccination programmes when levels of disease started rising too much due to a drop in vaccine uptake. Italy for example did this a few years ago with the DPT and HepatitisB vaccine.

(HepB is not, contrary to some popular belief, solely a sexually transmitted virus. It is also transmitted via blood and in utero).

and quite a few countries have schemes to encourgae people to vaccinate, like in Australia families actually get financial bonuses if their children have had all their vaccinations, and in America I believe a number of state schools require children to be vaccinated before they come to school.

Being medical and all, I am definitly in favour of full 100% vaccination.
Sometimes I wonder why parents don't vaccinate their children; perhaps they don't quite understand the risks they are exposing their children too.

Yes, sometimes someone may have a very severe anaphylactic reaction to a vaccination, but, being honest, that is very very very rare.
The same thing could happen the first time a child is given nuts (and nut allergy is a lot more common than vaccination allergy!! I went to a talk just on Wednesday where the Allergy specialist doctor said that some 30% of children now have some form of nut allergy. Admittedly most are mild reactions.)

I mean, even something like measles, is a very very serious condition. I don't know if the people who reject measles vaccinations think that it's like chickenpox or something, but it certainly isn't!! Measles has about a 40% mortality rates, which is huge!! (vs. chickenpox which has a 0% mortality!)

anyway, perhaps forced vaccinations is a bit extreme, it certainly won't make the medical profession very popular in the parent's eyes; but perhaps something like financial incentives to vaccinate is a good idea.

So yeh, just some thoughts that came up in our discussion that I thought I'd share!
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