Thousands of high school students in Ontario face suspension for having incomplete immunization records, despite repeated reminders to complete their records.
The Ontario Immunization of School Pupils Act ((R.S.O. 1990, c. I.1) requires that “The parent of a pupil shall cause the pupil to complete the prescribed program of immunization in relation to each of the designated diseases,” which are diphtheria, tetanus, polio, measles, mumps, and rubella. Students who can’t be immunized for conscientious, religious, or medical reasons can submit a legal exemption instead. A parent who neither has their child vaccinated nor submits an exemption is “guilty of an offence and on conviction is liable to a fine of not more than $1,000.” Alternately, a medical officer of the health “by a written order may require a person who operates a school in the area… suspend from attendance at the school a pupil named in the order.”
Now, as early as last November, municipal public health units have been distributing warnings to parents to submit proof of vaccination. Suspending students to remind their parents to contact public health units seems twisted. After all, the students themselves have done no wrong, and suspensions are usually applied to bad student behaviour.
One could argue that the suspensions are to protect the health of other persons at the school – specifically, unvaccinated students who have submitted an exemption and teachers whose vaccination records have been lost to the sands of time. One could also argue that the suspensions are to protect the health of students with a missing vaccination record by keeping them out of schools, which are cesspools of cheap cologne and bodily fluids.
However, the Act targets vaccination records rather than having had vaccinations in the first place. Once the suspended students come back, with either an exemption or a vaccination record, the unvaccinated students still pose a danger to themselves. You would have medical, moral, and religious vaccine-rejectors running around the school anyway.
Furthermore, any significant danger posed by a student with missing records would be best mitigated by suspending the student immediately after administrative officials realized that their vaccination records were missing. However, each student was sent home with reminder letters for months before being suspended. That’s months of allowing potentially unvaccinated children to stew in the aforementioned cesspools of bodily fluids and cheap cologne that are schools. Thus, with the current system, barring a student with an incomplete vaccination record from school is not an effective way of increasing public safety, and is clearly meant to correct the parent or guardian’s forgetfulness by using the presence of lil’ Jimmy or Sarah loafing around the house instead of loafing around at school, refreshingly out of the way.
In any case, health officials should first seek to fill in incomplete immunization records by contacting health providers, or through an electronic database. This is a hopelessly naïve statement, especially after the eHealth Ontario scandal in 2009. Furthermore, most students in high school right now were born from 1995 to 1999, meaning that their records are probably still sitting in a grotty filing cabinet somewhere.
Since this is an administrative concern, and the immediate safety of the students is not at stake, I wonder if a parent would respond more effectively to being threatened with a $1000 fine than with the threat of suspending their child from school.
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