Anti-vaccination safe houses. WTF?

by RICK MORTON

This woman wants to hide children from ‘evil’ doctors who are trying to save their lives.

Let’s all take a moment to let that sink in. Here’s an example of one child the anti-vaccine campaigner wanted to save, not from Hepatitis B, but from a life without it.

The baby was not even two days old and already it faced a future of chronic illness, diseases and possibly liver cancer.

If infected with Hepatitis B, the infant faced a 90 per cent chance of developing ‘chronic illness’ and in turn a a 25 per cent chance of experiencing liver cancer. It’s mother is a chronic sufferer of the same Hep B virus and so the child was at great risk. Those are not, by any betting person’s standards, very good odds.

But it was the orders of Justice Jean Dalton that sent a ripple around the country: the parents would have to vaccinate this child whether they liked it or not. And they most definitely did not like it.

The mother refused vaccinations on religious reasons, the father on ‘philosophical grounds’ because he believed the Hep B vaccine could cause his child to develop Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (a rare brain disorder) and be at increased risk of Dementia.

But nowhere, it seemed, were the parents concerned about the direct danger in which they’d placed their child.

Despite all this, it was the doctors that rabid anti-vaxxer Meryl Dorey targeted as the ‘child abusers’ on her Facebook page after the decision was released to the public at the end of last week.

The doctors.

After all, Dorey knows how to ‘cure’ Hep B with the help of tea leaves and dreams.

“Chinese herbal medicine has cleared all signs of Hep B infection from the system of people I know personally. Speak with a competent Chinese herbalist and ask them what they can do to help you,” she wrote on her anti-vaccine Facebook page.

She then went on to announce her gob-smacking vaccination safe-house program.

“If you find yourself in this situation and you are trapped in the hospital, contact the AVN and we will do what we can for you. We have hidden parents before and we will do so again if necessary,” she said.

She also told parents who know they are Hep B positive to ‘choose their hospital and doctors well’ or ‘consider a home birth’ to avoid facing the hard questions about vaccinations. What the actual hell?

Now hang on, who are the child abusers are again?

Here’s the thing. The one phase of the Hep B vaccine can reduce the risk of an infant contracting Hep B from a carrier parent by as much as 80 per cent … provided it is administered within 12 hours of birth. This 40-hour-old infant had already missed that opportunity, and how might it protest about its future health? What could it do except sit there helplessly like a blob, trapped by its own parents ‘philosophical objections’?

Nada.

Justice Dalton acknowledged the immediate welfare of the child trumped the desires of the parent (why should that be such a revolutionary thought?) but also curtailed her response by refusing to mandate future vaccinations to give the parents time to more adequately put their case, if they can. That seems reasonable.

There was a lot of hullabaloo about the rights of the parent in this scenario but bugger all for the small matter of the child’s physical health. Why?

Where are the conscientious objectors to harnessing their children in approved baby car seats, what about their rights to put the child at increased harm of a traffic accident?

It’s also in a child’s best interests to keep them away from cleaning products, but what of the philosophical critics who demand the right to leave their baby within reach of an unopened bottle of bleach?

You’re right, Ms Dorey. It is child abuse. But not on the part of the doctors.

– If you’d like to clear up some vaccination myths, check out this handy cheat sheet.

– If you’d like to see the comments for yourself, they can be found on Meryl Dorey’s anti-vax Facebook page.

Did you read about this case? Where do you draw the line between making parenting decisions for yourself and relying on experts for advice?