Physicians Are Starting to “Fire” Patients Whose Parents Refuse Vaccination for Their Children

The Medical Profession is Starting to Stand Up to People Who Deny Science

For a variety of reasons some parents refuse to allow their children to be vaccinated.  This may be caused by a fear that the vaccines are harmful to children, and among other things cause autism.  The medical profession does not accept this, in fact the use of vaccines has been incredibly successful in preventing disease and death.

Now physicians have apparently had enough.  Many are refusing to allow families that do not vaccinate to stay in their practices.

In a study of Connecticut pediatricians published last year, some 30% of 133 doctors said they had asked a family to leave their practice for vaccine refusal, and a recent survey of 909 Midwestern pediatricians found that 21% reported discharging families for the same reason.

By comparison, in 2001 and 2006 about 6% of physicians said they "routinely" stopped working with families due to parents' continued vaccine refusal and 16% "sometimes" dismissed them, according to surveys conducted then by the American Academy of Pediatrics

There are obviously valid reasons for physicians to do this, the strongest being that they need to communicate in the strongest manner possible to these parents that they are endangering their children.  But there is also the externalities, the fact that unvaccinated children are not just a threat to themselves, but a threat to others.

For Allan LaReau of Kalamazoo, Mich., and his 11 colleagues at

Bronson Rambling Road Pediatrics, who chose in 2010 to stop working with vaccine-refusing families, a major factor was the concern that unimmunized children could pose a danger in the waiting room to infants or sick children who haven't yet been fully vaccinated.

In one case, an unvaccinated child came in with a high fever and Dr. LaReau feared the patient might have meningitis, a contagious, potentially deadly infection of the brain and spinal cord for which a vaccine commonly is given. "I lost a lot more sleep than I usually do" worrying about the situation, he said.

The “anti-science” clique in this nation, you know the ones that deny evolution, that believe that the Earth was created in 7 days about 7,000 years ago and the ones who refuse to believe in the science of climate change because they don’t like the policy implications have always been a problem.  Now they are endangering their children.  That is wrong.