In an example of the difficult policy questions facing government officials attempting to counter a growing anti-vaccine movement, Australia has announced an aggressive new approach in this area: Cutting off government benefits to parents who refuse to inoculate their children.
Under the proposal, parents who claim philosophical objections to vaccines will no longer be eligible for welfare payments and childcare rebates that can equal up to $11,500 per child in American dollars. Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced the policy change on Sunday, although it still has to be approved by Parliament.
Like the United States, there’s a generally high rate of vaccination against preventable diseases in Australia. More than 90 percent of Australian children receive the shot that protects against measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR). But there’s been a recent uptick in the number of parents who are opting out of recommended vaccines for their kids. CNN reports that the anti-vaccine sentiments that originated with a widely discredited British study linking the MMR shot to autism have made their way to other western countries like Australia.
According to the government agency that tracks Australia’s childhood vaccination rates, the rate of kids going without their shots has doubled over the past decade, and there are now 39,000 children under the age of seven who haven’t received their immunizations. It’s something the government is taking seriously. Abbott says he’s prepared to send a strong signal to Australians who are opting out of vaccines.
“The Government is extremely concerned at the risk this poses to other young children and the broader community. The choice made by families not to immunize their children is not supported by public policy or medical research, nor should such action be supported by taxpayers in the form of child care payments,” Abbott said in a statement released on Sunday. In an interview with ABC News, Abbott added that the so-called “no jab, no pay” policy represents “a very important measure to keep our children and our families as safe as possible.”
The announcement has been met with opposition from Australians who remain skeptical of vaccines. Nearly 10,000 people have signed onto a petition saying that the government should not “punish parents with unconstitutional penalties for making an informed choice about their children’s health.” That petition also suggests that, by tying childcare payments to inoculation, government officials will be unfairly coercing low-income families into vaccinating their kids.
Here in the United States, where similar anti-vaccine sentiments helped fuel a massive measles outbreak at the beginning of this year, policymakers have been engaged in contentious debate about exactly how far the government can go to compel vaccinations. Like Australia, it’s a debate that pits officials’ desire to preserve public health against parents’ desire to make individual health choices for their families.
Recent research in this area suggests that low-income Americans and people without health insurance — in other words, the people who have less interaction with the health care system — are more likely to be skeptical about the safety of vaccines. But public health experts here have never gone so far as to suggest that government benefits should be tied to vaccination. Instead, U.S. politicians have been working to tighten the loopholes that allow parents to easily obtain exemptions to state-level requirements to vaccinate their kids. These loopholes have been directly linked to disease outbreaks.
There have been some recent court cases that lend precedent to the government’s interest in vaccination. In 1991, in the midst of a measles outbreak in Philadelphia, a court ordered children in a close-knit religious community to be vaccinated against their parents’ will. Last year, a federal judge upheld a policy in New York City that allows schools to bar unvaccinated children from classes during outbreaks of vaccine preventable illnesses. And just last month, a Connecticut court awarded a pro-vaccination father with the right to make medical decisions for his children over his ex-wife’s objections.