Baby pays price for parents’ anti-vaccination stance

Two children are in serious condition after contracting preventable illnesses, but a prominent anti-vaccination campaigner appears unmoved, blaming doctors in one case, rather than the child’s parents for refusing immunisation.

The Sunday Telegraph reported that a 5-week-old boy was fighting for his life after suffering a brain haemorrhage. His parents had refused the vitamin K injection that’s routinely given to newborns to prevent Newborn Haemorrhagic Disease.

The baby will likely be left severely disabled, if he survives, the newspaper reported.

Meanwhile, a 7-year-old girl has been hospitalised with tetanus after her parents refused doctors treating her injured toe permission to give the girl a protective anti-tetanus injection.

But a high-profile anti-vaccination campaigner has blamed the medical staff treating the girl for her contracting tetanus. Meryl Dorey, who runs the Australian Vaccination-sceptics Network, claimed in a blog that the hospital workers should have better cleaned the child’s wound, reports said.

“Rather than being a story of irresponsible parenting, one could possibly make a case that this is instead a case of medical negligence based on ignorance of the symptoms of tetanus infections and potentially incorrect or incomplete cleaning of the child’s wound in the first instance,” she wrote, according to a report in The Daily Telegraph.

Both children are from northern New South Wales, an anti-vaccination hotspot, but have both been moved to Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital in Brisbane for treatment.

The government currently withholds family benefits payments and the childcare rebate from parents who fail to vaccinate their children in line with the National Immunisation Schedule.

Do you think the government’s stance on immunisation is the right on, or should parents be free to choose?