In the midst of the current measles outbreak and ongoing debates about a parent’s right to not vaccinate their children, some might wonder how bad it needs to get before legitimate requirements should be put in place.
As of right now, it doesn’t seem likely that the legal system will get involved. But back in 1991, it did.
Philadelphia was hit the hardest during that outbreak, and the primary source was the Faith Tabernacle Congregation. Dr. Robert Ross was deputy health commissioner in Philadelphia at the time.
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“This church community did not believe in either immunizations or medical care,” Ross told NPR. He is now the president of the California Endowment, a private health foundation.
The church ran a school that had 1,000 students, none of which had been vaccinated due to religious reasons, Ross said. When his office got a phone call from a grandparent saying many of the children were sick with fevers and head-to-toe rashes, they immediately suspected measles. When the churches pastor refused to let health officials immunize the students, Ross and his colleagues decided to go door to door.
Some parents were cooperative and let officials into their homes. Many kids had the measles, but not all of them were in bad shape. One 8-year-old girl, however, was extremely ill.
“[She] was lying on the couch in front of the television, ashen and pale, and with a very rapid respiratory rate. I felt that she may die within hours if we didn’t get her to treatment,” Ross said.
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Prepared for such an unfortunate occasion, a judge was on call to issue a court order requiring the extremely sick children to be taken to a hospital. But it wasn’t an easy feat for Ross in that situation. The girl’s grandmother tried to prevent him from making the call.
“She began lecturing me about believing in the power of the Lord,” Ross said. “It was a viscerally disturbing episode that left me quite shaken.”
The girl was taken to the hospital and survived, but hundreds more in the city were being infected, so Ross and his colleagues did something drastic and got a court order that forced parents at Faith Tabernacle to have their children vaccinated.
“I recall we lined the children up and gave the immunizations, and many of the parents were actually weeping,” he said.
The reason this drastic measure went through was because just years previous to the outbreak, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that parents can’t deny lifesaving medical treatments to their children for religious reasons.
Once the outbreak subsided, nine kids across Philadelphia had died, six of which were from Faith Tabernacle.
Could a court order like this be put in place again, depending on how bad it gets? Potentially.
“Were things ever to get as bad, even approaching as bad as things were in Philadelphia in 1991, yes, there are certainly legal remedies to make sure that we can compel parents to protect their children,” Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told NPR.
Continuing to educate people about the safety of the MMR vaccine is the most important thing at this point, and some state lawmakers are stepping up to make amendments on previously accepted exemptions.
Ross says now the only way courts should intervene is if it’s clear that parents are putting their children’s lives at risk. What the tipping point is for determining that is debatable.
