Experts back father’s appeal in anti-vaccination case

Arbitrator ruled mother could deny inoculation

Experts from three provinces have offered their services for free as a Toronto father fights an arbitrator’s ruling that lent legal credence to discredited anti-vaccination views.

The father is appealing an arbitration decision that upheld his ex-wife’s opposition to having their two children vaccinated. The decision cited anti-immunization activists who wrongly claimed vaccines do more harm than good.

The four doctors — infectious disease specialists including a university professor and two public-health officials — came forward of their own accord as concern mounts about outbreaks of measles and other infections linked to vaccine opposition.

“I am writing this letter to counter misinformation about vaccines and because I am concerned about the health of the children at the centre of this case and the health of Canadian children in general,” said Dr. Karina Top, a professor and infectious disease specialist at Halifax’s Dalhousie University.

In arguing to have the case reopened, the father’s lawyer, Joanna Harris, also blasted arbitrator Herschel Fogelman’s ruling.

Fogelman wrongly approved “experts” who lacked authority to testify, knew nothing about a key federal vaccination organization and failed to give the father help the law requires for litigants who lack legal representation, Harris said in written pleadings.

An Ontario Superior Court judge gave the green light Thursday for the appeal to proceed, though the father had missed the deadline for doing so. Justice Freya Kristjanson also imposed an interim ban on publishing the parents’ or children’s identities, and will consider a more sweeping request from the mother to seal the whole court file on June 25.

“The issues of vaccines is a polarizing one,” the judge noted.

The mother has previously declined to talk about the case, and her lawyer said Thursday he was not authorized to comment.

In an interview with the National Post, the father said he feels it is more important than ever that his children receive the basic childhood vaccines. They’ve already suffered a bout of whooping cough, a vaccine-preventable illness.

“Every week you can see, the measles are going crazy,” said the businessman, who is paying his legal bills largely with a Gofundme campaign set up when the Post first reported on the case. “There is a sense of urgency. We really need to do something very quickly … I was trying to bring this as a community issue; it’s not just a personal matter.”

The couple divorced in 2016, with a joint custody agreement allowing for disagreements to be resolved through mediation and then, if necessary, binding arbitration. The father says he always favoured vaccinating his two sons — now aged 12 and eight — but didn’t push the issue while married. He did after the divorce, though says he couldn’t afford a lawyer at the hearings before Fogelman in 2017.

The sessions had to be postponed at one point when the children contracted whooping cough — or pertussis — which also required the father’s new partner, who was pregnant, to receive a booster shot. The disease can be fatal for newborns.

The arbitrator refused to accept evidence the father obtained toward the end of the hearings from Dr. Alana Rosenthal, a pediatric infectious disease specialist, saying it had been submitted in an improper form.

Fogelman did qualify two witnesses called by the mother as experts, relying mostly on Dr. Toni Bark. The Illinois-based physician has shifted her practice chiefly to alternative medicine such as homeopathy, and is a mainstay in the anti-vaccination movement.

A Michigan judge later refused to approve her as a vaccination expert.

Bark outlined a litany of perils she alleged are related to immunization, but Fogelman said he was particularly swayed by her testimony that the mother had a genetic mutation which made it difficult to clear the “toxins” in vaccines, and that her son may have inherited it.

Yet there is little or no scientific evidence the MTHFR gene causes vaccine side-effects and, according to the father’s legal factum, the mother does not actually have the mutation.

Indeed there are “no reputable scientific studies” linking any genetic mutation to serious reactions to childhood vaccination, said Dr. Lawrence Loh, associate medical officer of health for Ontario’s Peel Region and one of Presti’s experts.

“The science is absolutely clear,” wrote Dr. Jocelyn Srigley, a medical microbiologist at B.C. Children’s Hospital and head of infection prevention and control at the Provincial Health Services Authority. “Vaccines have been one of the most effective public health interventions ever, reducing morbidity and mortality due to infectious diseases to levels previously unseen in human history.”

But lack of knowledge today of the diseases that vaccines prevent, suspicion of government and industry and other factors have “created a perfect environment for groups seeking financial gain or to disrupt society to spread misinformation,” said Dalhousie’s Top.

I AM CONCERNED ABOUT THE HEALTH OF THE CHILDREN.