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A Growing Movement Against Mandatory Vaccines
I used to think that only people with ultra-conservative religious beliefs or anti-establishment opinions home-schooled their kids. But after reading an October 2008 article in USA Today,1 I learned differently. Debra and Curtis Barnes are part of a growing number of Americans who home-school their three children solely to avoid having them vaccinated.
Debra Curtis is hardly a fringe member of society. She has a busy chiropractic practice in Mississippi and is president of the Mississippi Vaccination Information Center, a group of 159 concerned parents who believe that mandatory vaccinations for school-age children are a dangerous over-reach by state governments.
This group is not alone in their concerns. Surprisingly perhaps, they have the support of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), whose thousands of members are not anti-vaccine, but believe that the government and individual school districts do not have the right to mandate vaccines without parental informed consent. The AAPS factsheet says that “42 states have mandatory vaccine policies, and many children are required 22 shots by first grade.”2
New Jersey has the highest requirement of mandatory childhood vaccines in the US— 35 doses of 13 different vaccines,3 most of them administered to children between the ages of 1 and 7. Parents must comply with the vaccine schedule if their children will be attending school or daycare unless they have received a religious or medical exemption.
Perhaps not surprisingly, New Jersey also has the highest rate of autism among 14 states that were analyzed in 2007 by the CDC4 — 10.6 cases of autism per 1,000 children (or 1 in 94), compared to an average of 6.6 per 1,000 (1 in 152) children overall.5
Like the AAPS and the parents of many home-schooled children, citizen groups all over the country are speaking out against the ever increasing number of government-mandated vaccines and mobilizing to do something about it.
The New Jersey Coalition for Vaccination Choice (NJCVC), an expanding group of parents, physicians, holistic organizations, autism support groups, and other concerned citizens is currently lobbying for a Conscientious Belief Exemption that will allow parents to refuse mandatory immunizations for their children on the basis of sincerely held moral objections.
