NJ’s School/Vaccine Battle Need Not Pit Public Health Against Individual Rights

New Jersey has been trying to pass a law that eliminates the religious exemption from its school vaccine mandate. Potent anti-vaccine activism has thus far stifled the bill. In The vaccine bill is an adequate compromise. For now, the New Jersey Star-Ledger editorializes:

It’s been 115 years since the Supreme Court ruled that states can mandate vaccines to protect the public health, and 98 years since the court ruled that learning institutions could exclude unvaccinated students from attending schools in their districts.

Every challenge to both rulings has been swept aside, apparently due to a cosmic awakening to the wonders of indisputable medical science. Or perhaps it was just common sense: In 1900, 30 percent of all deaths in the US were children less than 5 years of age. Today, it’s barely 1 percent, because children who would have previously died from childhood infections live full lives now, thanks to vaccines and antibiotics.

So it is with some ambivalence that we hope both chambers pass the vaccine bill Monday [1/13/2020].

It isn’t the mandatory compliance bill that lawmakers had promised for nearly a decade, because the anti-vax forces brought their percussion instruments and windy cascade of First Amendment rhetoric to Trenton to blow open a loophole that may not benefit anyone at all.

The compromise bill “allows private schools or day care centers to accept unvaccinated children.” 

I posted the following comments:

I’m always suspicious when science is used to push a political agenda. Science is not an infallible omniscient authority. Science should be consulted when making law, but only in conjunction with the broader picture. For example, individual rights, the foundation of free societies, should always overlay the law. Rights are not mere “rhetoric.” Properly understood, individual rights are inviolable. They are crucial protectors against all forms of tyranny. With that perspective, some points:

1. Individual rights means equality of rights. For both 1st and 14th Amendment reasons, there should never be a strictly religious exemption from any law. If there be exemptions, it should extend to all conscientious objectors, religious or non-religious. 

2.            Schools public or private have the right to establish entry requirements, including vaccine requirements. Parents’ right not to vaccinate their kids does not mean the “right” to force a school to risk infecting other kids.

3.            But if kids are excluded from a school, the parents should not be forced to pay for that school. This is clear with respect to private schools. But the same should go for public schools. If a kid is excluded from a public school, the education tax dollars should follow the unvaccinated kid to whatever alternative the parents choose.

I side with the vaccine requirement. I believe science should always be consulted, and its clear to me that vaccine benefits far outweigh the risks, both regarding personal health and the health and rights of others. But individual rights should always be respected and protected as well. On this basis, there is a compromise that can protect both “public health” and individual rights; a vaccine mandate coupled with parental school choice.

Rights “properly understood” means every individual has the right to live by his/her own judgement so long as his actions don’t violate the same rights of others. Clearly, walking around with an airborne infectious disease crosses the line into other peoples’ rights.

On Monday, January 13, 2020, the bill failed to pass. It is now dead, as the current legislative session is over. The bill will have to be reintroduced in the next session and begin the approval process anew. State Senate President Stephen Sweeney vowed to get the bill passed eventually.

Related Reading:

Moral Rights and Political Freedom—Tara Smith

On Mandatory Vaccinations, Protect Everyone’s Right to Object, Not Just Religionists’ Rights

Vaccine Exemption Bill Violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments, Fairness

America’s ‘Science Problem,’ America’s Ideology Problem

Arizona Governor's "Religious Freedom" Veto Was the Right Move

Two Views on Religious Exemptions from Anti-Discrimination Laws

Related Viewing:

The War on Vaccines: A Conversation with Dr. Amesh Adalja from ARI