Ontario May Force Anti-Vaxxers to Take a Class to Convince Them Vaccines Work

Ontario is taking a hard line against parents who choose not to vaccinate their kids.

The province has introduced new legislation that would force parents who opt to skip vaccines to take a one-on-one class with a public health official. If the law passes, it will become the only jurisdiction in Canada to require something like this.

“People have been framing it as a science class. That’s a bit of a mischaracterization,” Joshua McLarnon, policy advisor for provincial health minister Eric Hoskins, told Motherboard. “It’s an opportunity for these parents to speak face-to-face with a public health [worker], and talk about the value of vaccination.”

The details haven’t yet been hashed out, and nobody has decided exactly what such a course would involve. “It wouldn’t be an intensive, two-week course,” McLarnon said—maybe just a day.

Although vaccines can cause some generally mild side effects, some parents opt not to vaccinate kids because of a misguided belief that they’re harmful—that they can cause autism, for example, a claim that’s been debunked many times. Others see vaccines as a “Big Pharma” ploy, or believe that the body will naturally clear infections from measles and other contagious illnesses. (As a supposed alternative to vaccination, lollipops infected with chickenpox were at one point being traded around to promote “natural immunity,” according to reports.)

Ontario, along with New Brunswick, already has legislation that requires kids to be vaccinated in order to go to school, McLarnon noted, but kids can receive medical or other exemptions. Only a small number of kids actually has to avoid vaccination for medical reasons.

Public health officials in other parts of the country seem to like the idea of a mandatory course, because McLarnon said he’s been getting lots of calls about it.

Even so, Canada already has high immunization rates. Can a one-day course change the minds of the relatively small number of holdouts who’ve decided to skip their vaccines?

According to figures released in 2015, about 90 per cent of Canadian toddlers had their shots against diseases like measles, mumps and rubella. We could do better. Public health experts typically say that about 95 per cent of a population must be vaccinated to achieve what’s called “herd immunity”—when a disease can’t spread effectively, because enough people are immune to stop it in its tracks. And, despite the push to get vaccinated, parts of Canada have seen recent and troubling outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, like measles.

Just this week, 591 high school students in Waterloo, Ontario were suspended for failing to keep their vaccination rates up-to-date, according to the Waterloo Record.

We do know that so-called “vaccine skeptics” tend to live close to one another, creating pockets around the country that are extra vulnerable to disease. But studies are divided on how to convince these skeptics that vaccines are safe and necessary.

In one paper, published in 2015 in the journal PNAS, authors found that the best way to convince parents of the importance of vaccination was to remind them of the dangers of communicable disease. Another found that “emotional scare tactics” don’t work.

In that second study, people read messages about vaccination that showed an image of a child in a hospital bed. When the child was described as having a vaccine-preventable disease because she hadn’t been immunized, those with anti-vaccine views actually weren’t overly emotionally affected, maybe because their pre-existing bias affected how they processed the information, according to the Washington State University researcher.

Until we know more about what sorts of information will be included in its vaccine education course, it’s hard to say if Ontario’s plan will work. But if kids are forced to temporarily leave class because their parents didn’t get them vaccinated, it seems only fair that those same parents should have to go back to school, even if it’s just for a one-day detention.