I was visiting the (dubiously named) National Vaccine Information Center’s Facebook page, when a post caught my attention enough to click on it. As per usual, NVIC had hidden the link behind a shortened URL and a photo posted directly to their page (so that a thumbnail of the link could not be seen), but their intro was short and confusing: “We Will Not Give Up Our Human Rights for Our Civil Rights.” What did that mean? I had to find out, so I clicked away.
It led me to the NVIC newsletter (link brings you to a Do Not Link page) and a word salad-y, lengthy republication of Barbara Loe Fisher’s speech in front of the California anti-vaxxers protesting SB277.
The piece was a mishmash of words like “freedom,” “liberty,” “choice,” mixed with vague sentiments concerning “vaccine injury” and whatnot. I had to slog through the freedom liberty fighting stuff to get to the part that had caught my eye. In context, it asserted: “We will not give up our human rights for our civil rights. We will not give up the human right to informed consent to medical risk taking in order to exercise our civil right to an education and medical care and employment.”
If I were not thinking, it might sound like she had a case. In essence, the argument is that by eliminating the personal belief exemption in California, parents will no longer be given informed consent before their children are given vaccines, and therefore they will not know the risks; the purpose of foregoing consent would be to enroll their children in school (and then the slippery slope of seeing a doctor and getting a job).
First of all, hogwash.
Informed consent happens at the doctor’s office, and it happens when parents receive the Vaccine Information Sheet (VIS). Furthermore, it is federal law that a VIS be given to a parents before their children receive vaccines. Eliminating an exemption to school-entry vaccine requirements will not make doctors decide to chuck federal law and jab away at kids without handing the parents a copy of the VIS. Assertions otherwise are ludicrous fantasy-laden conspiracy theories.
The language Fisher uses in asserting that children will be denied their access to education goes beyond simple concerns about schooling. She frames it as “human rights” and “civil rights” issues. According to this anti-vaccine speech, receiving a VIS is a human right, and being educated in a school with other children is a civil right.
When used in reasonable discourse, being given full information about a medical procedure could be considered a human right inasmuch as experimenting on a human being or subjecting a human being to medical procedures without their knowledge is a violation of human rights.
However, when I perused the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I found nothing about abstaining for immunization. The UDHR does touch upon a human’s inherent rights to be free from servitude, torture, fair justice, asylum, nationality, and so forth. Just to remind readers, the assertion is that by eliminating personal belief exemptions to school entry, a denial of “informed consent” (receiving the VIS?) will ensue akin to torture, slavery, and being jailed without a fair trial. The language is inflammatory enough to scorch the fields of any possible civil conversation.
The allusion to civil rights is just as inflammatory. When most people think of civil rights and education, they think of black students in the 19050s braving protests as they became the first students to be integrated into white public schools.
For too many decades after the passage of the 13th and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, students had been denied a decent education simply because of the color of their skin. Undoing this injustice was the beginning of the Civil Rights era, and the beginning of our learning about the evils of discrimination.
To be clear, let’s look at the definition of civil rights by Cornell University Law School:
A civil right is an enforceable right or privilege, which if interfered with by another gives rise to an action for injury. Examples of civil rights are freedom of speech, press, and assembly; the right to vote; freedom from involuntary servitude; and the right to equality in public places. Discrimination occurs when the civil rights of an individual are denied or interfered with because of their membership in a particular group or class. Various jurisdictions have enacted statutes to prevent discrimination based on a person’s race, sex, religion, age, previous condition of servitude, physical limitation, national origin, and in some instances sexual orientation. [emphasis mine]
Civil rights and equal protection under the law are denied to people because they are easily identified by their membership in a group. Unvaccinated children and their parents do not suffer discrimination on the order of any of the other classes of human beings listed above. Furthermore, unvaccinated children are unvaccinated because their parents chose not to vaccinate them*.
All schools in the United States have requirements for entry. These requirements are not civil rights violations. They are checkpoints to make sure our children are prepared for school and are being cared for. Common requirements include proof of age with a birth certificate, proof of residence, signature of a doctor who has performed a physical exam, a readiness screening, and an immunization form. These requirements keep our schools safe and help them function fairly and well.
Parents who do not want to fulfill any of the above requirements are asking for the school to make exceptions to the law, and schools will usually only do so for good cause (such as a homeless student who has no proof of residence). For many years, we have allowed exceptions to proof of immunization for no other reason than the parents heard a scary rumor and decided to follow it instead of their doctor’s advice.
Disallowing parents from seeking an exception to immunization school entry requirements is not a civil rights violation. It is fair to debate whether or not this is the best strategy to raise immunization rates, but it is not a civil rights violation.
It is offensive to claim that ending the personal belief exemption in California is asking parents to trade their human rights for their civil rights. Real people in the world have to deal with human rights and civil rights violations. We live in a world where people are being deported from the home in which they lived their whole lives or are being gunned down in churches because of their race.
The anti-vaccine movement once again betrays its tendency toward using its privilege to see itself as a victim when they equate themselves with the real threats people face in the world. We should not let them chop up the verbiage of rights and freedom in order to make their own wrongheaded salad of righteous indignation.
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