New York mayor to fine parents who don’t vaccinate children
● Residents of neighbourhood ordered to go and have measles jabs
In a rare order, New York City is requiring residents of a heavily Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood to be vaccinated for measles. Now the question is how officials intend to enforce that demand.
Authorities plan to start by asking people sickened in the city’s biggest measles outbreak since 1991 about where they’ve been and whom they’ve encountered.
Then officials want to interview those contacts, aiming to persuade them to get inoculations if they aren’t already vaccinated or immune from having had the disease. The city says it’s ready to help arrange the shots - but also to fine people as much as $1,000 if they refuse.
“Our goal is not to fine anyone,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said. “Our goal is to get people vaccinated. But we’re also trying to help everyone understand there is urgency here.”
The emergency order revives a public-health strategy that experts say hasn’t been used in the US in recent memory: commanding people to get vaccinations or face fines. It’s meeting a mixed reaction in the Brooklyn neighbourhood affected by the order and raising red flags among civil liberties advocates.
De Blasio acknowledged it’s “an unusual action,” saying it’s motivated by “the sheer extent of the crisis.”
Some 285 measles cases have been diagnosed in the nation’s biggest city since last fall, compared to two in all of 2017, officials said.
It’s among outbreaks that have spurred 465 measles cases around the country
this year, the second-greatest number in any year since measles was declared eradicated in the US in 2000.
New York City’s order applies to people who live, work or go to school in four postcodes in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighbourhood. There are some exceptions, such as for children under 6 months old.
The city believes an estimated 1,800 children in the neighbourhood hadn’t been immunized as of December.
Orthodox Jewish schools and day care programs in Williamsburg were ordered to exclude unvaccinated students from classes during the outbreak or risk being closed down.
At Yeshiva Kehilath Yakov school, Rabbi David Oberlander said administrators had taken pains to make sure children with measles weren’t in school.
“We try to control our school, and we really strive to comply 100 per cent with the Department of Health,” he said. “But we don’t control the parents, and we don’t intend to control the parents.”
Some Williamsburg residents – even those who support vaccination - said they felt uncomfortable about the city pushing inoculations on people who don’t want them.
Others remain convinced, against expert assurances, that vaccines are unsafe.
“It’s true that a lot of people have measles, and measles are not a very good thing, said resident Aron Braver, but he thinks the vaccine is “also not a very good thing.”
“And it’s everybody’s option to do what he wants. What he decides,” Braver added.
The New York Civil Liberties Union also questioned the city’s emergency order requiring vaccinations for all. Executive director Donna Lieberman called it “an extreme measure” that “raises civil liberties concerns about forced medical treatment.”
De Blasio, a Democrat, said officials were confident the order would withstand legal scrutiny.
US cities have fined residents before for not being vaccinated, but “not in our modern history,” said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown Law professor specialising in public health law.
The US Supreme Court upheld such an order in a 1905 case involving smallpox vaccinations in Cambridge, Massachusetts.