More controversially, parents who object to vaccination on grounds of religion or conscience can request a nonmedical exemption. Students can be exempted from the aforementioned penalty if they submit a form signed by a physician or a registered nurse either stating that an immunization would be dangerous or an unnecessary by-reason of past infection, or showing laboratory evidence of immunity. This is despite the fact that Ontario is one of the handful of provinces that have made childhood immunization compulsory: under the Immunization of School Pupils Act (ISPA ), parents must furnish vaccination records at the time of school enrolment, or the students must face a 20-day suspension from school and $1,000 fine. In recent years, Ontario and other provinces have wrestled with outbreaks of measles, mumps, whooping cough and other preventable-by-vaccine diseases, as Canada fails to meet targets for childhood vaccinations ( OECD 2020).Īs we write, the issue is again making headlines in Ontario, with reports that over 10% of students at 12 Toronto alternative schools have not received their vaccinations ( Brockbank 2019).
Failure to vaccinate costs our healthcare system as well: every dollar invested in immunizing children against measles, mumps and rubella returns $16 in healthcare savings down the road ( Public Health Agency of Canada 2016). This exposes the individual child to infection and weakens “herd immunity,” raising the ambient risk for groups that cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons, such as infants, pregnant women and those with compromised immune systems.
Through a complex mix of complacency about infectious disease outbreaks, mistrust of mainstream medicine and a consumerist orientation toward healthcare, a growing number of parents are declining to have their children immunized ( Dubé et al. Mass immunization is one of the great triumphs of modern medicine – so much so that it risks becoming a victim of its own success.
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