Why Tho? Is it child abuse to keep kids unvaccinated during a pandemic?

This is the latest installment of The Oregonian/OregonLive’s advice column, “Why Tho?” by Lizzy Acker. Lizzy’s advice first appears in our weekly advice newsletter. Want to get it early? Subscribe now.

Dear Lizzy,

Is failing to vaccinate a child considered child abuse in Oregon? The law says that failing to provide adequate medical care is child abuse, and during outbreaks, failing to vaccinate kids has been considered abuse in other states. So maybe it is abuse, in which event parents who are on the fence should consider it further.

Curious

Dear Curious,

It’s a good question. Now that school has started and every single kid under 12 remains ineligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, I’m sure you and I aren’t the only people wondering if there are more ways we can persuade hesitant parents to vaccinate kids 12 and over. And then, when -- fingers crossed, please make this soon -- the vaccine becomes available to all those littler people, we really want to make sure everyone who can gets inoculated and we end this ongoing, never-ending pandemic nightmare.

Personally, I would love to take my child to a grocery store someday. I am pretty sure she believes that all items just appear when she needs them and stores are about as real to her as dragons.

Anyway, according to the law, “failure to provide the child with immunizations or routine well-child care alone does not constitute medical neglect.”

But, that was clearly written in a different time. So I decided to check in with two experts.

Dr. Doug Opel is a pediatrician and the interim director at the Treuman Katz Center for Pediatric Bioethics at Seattle Children’s Hospital. He has helped us with this question before, when it was more specific and less about the well-being of society as a whole.

According to Opel, this question has been debated for a long time.

“In general,” he said, “to determine whether to intervene against a parent’s decision, courts generally have to make an assessment of whether the decision made by the parent significantly increases the likelihood of serious harm to their child as compared to other options.”

“In most cases,” Opel said, “a parent’s refusal of a vaccine for their healthy child likely does not meet this threshold, although this has been rarely adjudicated in the courts, especially recently.”

And, Opel said, there may be some circumstances where it might be more likely to be considered abuse, “such as during an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease (i.e. increasing the risk of disease to an unvaccinated child) or if the child has an underlying condition that would increase their risk of serious harm if they developed a vaccine-preventable disease because they were unvaccinated.”

Nicole Warren is a partner at the Portland law firm of Gazzola & Warren. She practices family law. Her answer was a little more conclusive, though similar.

Warren said she didn’t believe that failing to vaccinate a child, even during a pandemic, constituted child abuse.

“Generally speaking,” she said, “parents who have legal custody of their children have the right to make medical decisions for them, which presumably includes the decision to vaccinate or not. Plus, Oregon law specifically excludes failure to immunize children as a basis for a finding of medical abuse (see ORS 413-015-1015(1)(d)(B)).”

My advice? Even if it isn’t legally required, get yourself and your kids vaccinated as soon as possible, so not one extra person has to die from a preventable disease.

Lizzy

Got a burning question for Lizzy? Email her at lacker@oregonian.com.

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