Last updated on November 27th, 2017 at 12:59 pm
Like what happened in France a few weeks ago, the parliament in Italy mandates vaccines for its children. Italy’s parliament gave final approval to mandating a list of childhood vaccinations for school children up to the age of 16. The goal of the legislation was to counter the anti-vaccine trend that Italian officials have attributed to misinformation.
Under these new requirements, parents must present proof of vaccinations to gain admission into preschools, while parents of children of mandatory school age face fines of up to €500 (US$591) for noncompliance. The requirements cover 10 vaccinations, including diphtheria, tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella and chicken pox. Two vaccines were dropped from an initial list of 12 – meningococcal B and meningococcal C.
During the parliamentary debate, Italian health officials faced a measles outbreak that caused the US to issue a travel warning. In addition, a scandal arose in northern Italy that involved a nurse who claimed for years to have vaccinated children but had not.
Of course, anti-vaccine activists protested outside of the parliament building using some fo the same tropes and myths pushed by those groups in the USA. In California, anti-vaccine protests were a regular event while the state legislature was considering SB277 which, in effect, mandated vaccines for the state’s children.
At the same time, the top Italian court once again found that there is no connection between vaccines and autism. Of course, science has found no correlation between vaccines and autism.
The Italian parliament was convinced by data that showed only 85.3% of Italian 2 years had been vaccinated in 2015. this is well short of the 95% herd effect threshold that is recommended by many public health agencies.
Furthermore, there were 3,232 cases of measles in Italy between January and June of 2017. This is a significant increase over the 478 cases during the same period 2016.
Governments, like France and Italy, have no choice but to reject the anti-science beliefs of segments of the population, and subsequently they mandated vaccines to protect children from diseases that can kill. Maybe if Italy had mandated these vaccines a few years ago, the children who died from measles would be alive now, sharing wonderful lives with their parents.
Right now, only California, West Virginia and Mississippi, in the United States, eliminate all personal belief exemptions and mandate that children must be fully vaccinated before entering school. West Virginia and Mississippi have some of the highest vaccination rates in the country, and even after just one year, California’s rates are way up.
I hope that this is the early part of the trend to make vaccines mandatory. There simply is no reasonable evidence that vaccines are anything but safe and effective. Most of the reasons used by the anti-vaccine crowd is easily debunked with the simplest of scientific reasoning.
The trend to mandate vaccines are not examples of government overreach. They are attempts for cooler heads to prevail over the myths and lies pushed by those opposed to vaccines. They are attempts to make certain our children are protected against vaccine preventable diseases.
