Is it right children are vaccinated without parental approval?
AROW has erupted in England about the planned Covid vaccination of children without parental consent. The actor and anti-political correctness campaigner Lawrence Fox (Inspector Morse’s sidekick) has said he will remove his children from school because of the UK Government’s planned vaccination programme. For Fox, the limited benefits for children plus the potential risks from vaccinations make the plan unacceptable.
As it happens, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation has still not given their seal of approval for the mass vaccination of over 12s. This is likely to be for similar reasons to Fox, that the risk of Covid for children is negligible. Added to this, we know you can still catch the virus if you have been vaccinated, so the argument for it to limit the spread of Covid is more limited.
In Scotland we also find, for example, with a letter from Forth Valley NHS, that all primary and high school pupils will be offered the flu vaccine. The pupils, those 12 and over, will not need parental consent for this vaccine.
At one level there is nothing new in 12-yearolds being offered treatment without parental consent, as this is the legal position in Scotland. But is it right that such young children can receive medical treatment and vaccines against the wishes of their parents?
I am completely pro-vaccines. I think they are a brilliant advancement that has improved the lives of billions. It is also the case, I suspect, that most teachers and health workers go out of their way to involve parents in decisions. But the inscribed right of these workers to potentially go against the wishes of parents seems highly problematic.
Covid, vaccines and the safety measures associated with the virus have been politicised by the rise of ‘safetyism’ as a quasi-moral position
The argument being used in England relates to the idea of children being Gillick competent. This relates to the 1985 legal decision which ruled that a teenage girl could obtain contraception without parental involvement. However, the active pursuit of medical support by an individual seems quite different to a mass medical initiative being carried out in schools and targeted at every child.
An additional problem is that, to some extent, Covid, vaccines and the safety measures associated with the virus have been politicised, and the rise of “safetyism” as a quasi-moral position complicates the matter and could mean that there are professional and institutional pressures brought to bear on children to “do the right thing”.
To the extent that “Covid safety” has been politicised and moralised, we could also ask, will the competence test of 12-year-olds be a genuine test, or will the pressure to conform impact upon the judgement of the professionals involved so that all of these children are encouraged to take the vaccine?
A further and potentially dangerous consequence of the increasingly political and moralised nature of the disease model of society we appear to be developing is that there is also a backlash and a counter-politicisation of all vaccinations by anti-vaxxers.
There is already a reported fall in vaccinations for meningitis and septicaemia and also a fall, although a relatively small fall, in the take up of the MMR jabs. I suspect these falls relate to the reaction by some to the political and moral nature of the Covid discussion and an objection to the more authoritarian developments that have sullied and changed the way that some people think about vaccinations.
Like many other things in schools, we need to depoliticise the vaccine programme. We need to ensure it is based solely on a balanced medical judgement. We also need to take parents more seriously and treat them with the respect they deserve and not push jabs on to children whose parents object. For vaccines to be successful in a free society we need to win the medical argument for them.