WorldNetDaily: Shots in the dark

At issue in Barbara Simpson's column today: pediatricians who will refuse to see entire families when parents refuse vaccinations for their children for common (and not-so-common) childhood diseases.

Vaccination policy has not changed since the first vaccines became available. The threats in those days were read: diphtheria, pertussis ("whooping cough"), tetanus, poliomyelitis, mumps, chicken pox, and the two varieties of measles. (The threat also included smallpox, but after the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated from the human population, routine vaccination stopped.) The last four diseases remain as real threats--things you don't want to fool around with. (Chicken pox might sound harmless, but whoever gets it as a child is then set up to get the painful disease called shingles at the age of 60 and older.) Tetanus still presents a problem if you step on the proverbial rusty nail. But the other diseases I mentioned have all but disappeared. And in their place has come some unresolved questions about the safety of the vaccines themselves.

So suddenly the decision to vaccinate or not is no longer the no-brainer that it once was. Especially when children are now asked to be vaccinated against Hepatitis B and other diseases that are not environmental threats but spread by bad, usually adult, behavior.

So how can a doctor refuse to see a family if they try to be selective about vaccines? Part of the reason might be their fear of medical malpractice actions. Certain anti-vaccine activists, who insist that vaccination ought to be abandoned completely, would probably say, "If you don't want to be sued, then don't recommend the vaccine to anyone!" But most people still want the vaccines, because if some patients now question their safety, most don't, and they still fear the disease more than the vaccine. So why doesn't any doctor, faced with a parent who refuses vaccination, have the parents sign a waiver? More to the point, why doesn't the law make such waivers inarguable?

The issue, then, is whether a doctor can disclaim responsibility if something goes wrong with some medical strategy that the patient insisted upon, against medical advice, and whether such disclaimers will hold up. Too often, silver-tongued lawyers argue, "Well, the doctor should have known better than even to allow such a waiver." Trouble is, those same lawyers are likely to be the first to scream for the scalps of doctors who are now refusing to treat people who put patient and doctor both at some risk.

Bottom line: to solve the problem, re-establish the concept of individual responsibility.