Two sisters must receive the MMR vaccine

A judge ordered that two sisters, aged 11 and 15, must receive the MMR vaccine, raising issues of their human rights. In Scotland, with the introduction of GIRFEC and a named person to oversee the wellbeing of each child, it is to be wondered how disputes with parents about vaccinations will be resolved. In the article it also mentions that children in care were vaccinated against the will of their parents.

The father of the girls, who is divorced from their mother, brought a case to the high court seeking the vaccination, according to the BBC. The parents had agreed not to vaccinate the girls following the MMR controversy surrounding subsequently discredited claims that the vaccine could cause autism.

Mrs Justice Theis said it was a specific case "only concerned with the welfare needs of these children". The case is the third time the MMR issue has been before the court.

A mother was ordered to have her child immunised against measles, mumps and rubella in 2003 after the court ruled the benefits of vaccination outweighed the risks while in 2011, children in care were ordered to have the jab against the wishes of their parents.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/oct/12/court-sisters-mmr-vaccine-against-will

The following post discusses the competence of the girls to make their own decision.

The judge ruled that the girls were not competent to make a decision on their own behalf but you wonder at the wisdom of the judge when successive Cochrane Reviews have concluded "The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR studies, both pre- and post-marketing, are largely inadequate": while the rhetoric of these papers was pro the vaccine, they failed to disguise the underlying failure to ensure that the product is safe . Likewise, the bureaucratic line that MMR does not cause autism has been contradicted by a number of decisions in the US Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) , and notably in an Italian court case last year, uncontested by the Italian government.

Presently, the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) lists 63,438 events for MMR and 322 deaths: the limitation of the system is that as a passive reporting system cases are unconfirmed but also likely to be under-reported by fifty or a hundred times . Although the British state has largely rigged itself against the acknowledgment or compensation of vaccine damage the UK’s Vaccine Damage Payment Unit were forced in 2010 to acknowledge the grotesque damage to Robert Fletcher from MMR after a battle of 18 years. Most years (in contrast to the US’s VICP which has paid out $2.5b since 1989) there are no payments at all, and any payments that are made do not exceed £120k (less than $200k). In the UK vaccination takes place effectively entirely at the risk of citizen, which is another unreasonable feature of the present system given the moral pressure on citizens to comply.

http://www.ageofautism.com/2013/10/uncertainty-as-high-court-judge-rules-two-british-schoolgirls-should-be-given-mmr-vaccine.html