School vaccination enforcement will resume in next school year
Public health department delays suspension for students not up to date on inoculations
Hamilton’s public health department will soon send notices to parents of children whose vaccination records are not up to date, but says it will not suspend students with lapse records until the next school year.
The health department’s enforcement program — which would have seen students with out-of-date records suspended for up to 20 days — was halted in March in the wake of a sprawling cyberattack at city hall.
That attack resulted in the municipality being locked out of many of its systems, including the public health department immunization database. The crippled systems also meant parents could not upload their children’s vaccination records as they got their mandated shots to protect them from diseases like measles.
With no way to track which student records were up to date, the health department scuttled its enforcement program until the city systems were back up and running.
Although the online reporting tool is again available to parents, John Walker, the director of communicable disease control at the health department said on Tuesday that the enforcement program won’t resume this school year.
“Hamilton public health is in the process of providing notice to parents of students of overdue vaccine records and planning to resume the enforcement component of the Immunization of School Pupils Act in the 2024-25 school year,” said Walker in an emailed statement.
The enforcement program was a response to declining vaccination rates among elementary and high school students. In February, when the launch of the program was announced, more than a third of Hamilton students did not have upto-date records.
Immunization rates, including those against potentially lethal diseases like measles, dropped off during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The effect was not limited to Hamilton. Vaccination rates for measles around the world plummeted to such an extent that the World Health Organization (WHO) reported in December a 30-fold rise in measles cases in Europe.
When the pandemic receded, many public health departments — including Hamilton’s — ramped up efforts to get needles into arms to prevent outbreaks. In the case of highly communicable viruses likes measles, immunization levels had slipped below the threshold needed to stop community spread.
However, without a means to know who was immunized after the cyberattack, the program was suspended.
Walker said in an emailed statement that while the enforcement program was halted, vaccination clinics continue to operate.
“Hamilton public health’s school vaccination clinics were not impacted by the cybersecurity incident, and our vaccine program staff have continued to offer vaccine clinics in schools for school-aged vaccines,” said Walker. “As well, public health has continued to offer catch-up community clinics for those who have missed or overdue vaccines, particularly for those without access to primary care.”
The news that the enforcement program will not run during the last month of the school year comes shortly after the health department confirmed that a child under the age of five in Hamilton had died from a measles infection.
The health department has not disclosed the age or gender of the child, nor how they contracted the virus, but did confirm last week the child was not vaccinated. The death is the first measles-related death in Ontario in more than a decade.