As a kid, I was terrified of polio. This was the era of hospital iron lung wards, in which hulking machines noisily kept scores of children breathing. Believe me, my friends and I were very aware of those!
My parents signed me up to be in the first wave to receive the Salk vaccine series. Within years, polio was on a steep decline and the terror passed.
Which is why it is so stunning to me that about 10% of parents refuse to vaccinate their children against potentially deadly diseases. As a consequences, some preventable diseases–made rare by vaccinations–are on the rebound.
Now, some pediatricians are refusing unvaccinated children as patients. From the NYT story:
There is enough appeal in anti-vaccination thinking among members of the affluent class that certain pediatricians in the city, as they have elsewhere around the country, have made it a policy in recent years to refuse to see children whose parents won’t have them immunized.
A few years ago Pediatric Associates of NYC, which has branches in Murray Hill in Manhattan and Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, chose this course, David Horwitz, a partner in the practice told me, in large part because it simply became untenable to have unvaccinated children sitting in waiting rooms.
Earlier in the story, this interesting anecdote appears:
Amanda Uhry, who runs a consultancy called Manhattan Private School Advisors, which, as its name suggests, helps parents through the private-school application process, said she recently turned down a half-dozen clients when she discovered that they were opposed to vaccination. For a long while she had never inquired about the issue, but a few years ago, a child she was working with missed his kindergarten interview because of whooping cough, which left her stunned.
“I thought, Whooping cough? Who gets whooping cough anymore?” she said.
Why do people think that is?
It is one thing to have an ethical objection to vaccinations. But few “anti-vaxxers” fall into that category. Most are hysterical, trendy, or fall into that way overused category of “anti-science.
I’m usually adamantly opposed to coercion in medicine, But I sympathize with the doctors who refuse to accept the children of anti-vaxxers as patients.
Considering how tiny the world has become–and with the recent influx of poor children from destitute places and concomitant potential to be exposed to prevantable communicable diseases like measles or diphtheria–not vaccinating kids is just plain nuts.