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BC Won’t Require Measles Vaccination for Schools
(thetyee.ca)
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this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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"So, look Indigenous and other marginalized folks... I know we've had some less than great history about mandatory government programs. And yes, childhood education is essential, but if you don't agree to this mandatory medical program we will not allow your child in school."
It's a tricky balance but this article doesn't even attempt to explore reasons we might not be making these mandatory, which to my mind is criminally poor reporting and one of my major issues with the Tyee.
That’s not really a tricky balance, there is a clear right direction to pick
I am curious, though. Did First Nation consultation result in any voiced resistance against vaccination?
I love that you "know" the right direction without even knowing how margjnalized folks might feel about it.
Just to be clear, your opinion is that the government should just force marginalized folks to do what we think is the right thing regardless of their feelings or experiences?
(And if your second paragraph is a serious question, you could literally just google Canada First Nations vaccine hesitancy and learn a whole boatload.)
No
Indeed, TIL
This was a pretty interesting read: https://afn.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Dr.-Valerie-Gideon-Presentation_EN.pdf
Sorry, I'm clearly not understanding your position... Vaccines should be mandatory but also not?
Yes. Just like they already kind of are in a bunch of ways. At the very least they should be opt-out instead of opt-in, with immunization campaigns deployed in the spirit of increasingly making opt-out more exceptional
They already are opt out, not opt in.
How so? Encouraging people to vaccinate their kids and making the vaccine free is still an "opt in" system. What I mean with an opt out system is that it would demand effort and a processual review to not vaccinate (at some level, even if at the community level), like filing for being excused of immunization and having that file as part of the immunization record.
Maybe you should learn more about how the system functions before demanding changes?
Vaccines are largely done in schools with parents having to opt out.
All you've prosed is to add a weird layer of bureaucracy with no discernible benefit.
Edit: And yes, refusals to vaccinate are already part of someone's record. (This system is already used to contact people who have refused and to offer another round of immunizations etc.)
But that bureaucracy is what I mean with friction that defines what opting out means. Being invited to immunization and having ease to refuse is still opt in to me.
Maybe I am just unaware but what I understood from what goes into the record is that someone saying “no thanks, vaccines are a lie” is indistinguishable from “the healthcare system wronged my community so I don’t feel safe with this”. If those cases are indeed already distinguishable and I'm just mistaken, then I'll be gladly corrected because it means that we are already equipped to to make vaccination mandatory, because all we need is to have the due process to accommodate the concerns of the second group.
Sorry, was responding to someone else and realized I'd forgotten about this over the weekend.
But yeah, if you've met an anti vaxxer, you'd know yet another form or whatever isn't really the friction that's going to get them to vaccinate. Right now, you're proposing setting up some sort of, I dunno, interview process where we figure out how much trauma or marginalization allows someone to exempt themselves. (Is being Jewish and having family members who were experimented on enough? How about being Black but in Canada? Or having relatives from any number of autocratic regimes where government trust is not really a thing? And then how are we going to check this?)
This proposal is at a time when we don't have enough nurses or doctors and you want to spend a silly amount of money on adding more bureaucracy to make things slightly more difficult for a group that already went through way harsher just a few years ago? Really? And then spend however much more to lose in court?
I get that not everyone thinks through the rammifications and anti-vaxxer = bad so punish them but this doesn't seem particularly practical or beneficial no matter how laudable the goal of more vaccinations is.
That's not really it, and I didn't say anything of sorts. It just has to be something more than not showing up or just saying "no thanks" without any extra information. Nothing is going to be foolproof and that's not the point either, after all any anti-vaxxer can always self identify as First Nations for a day just to escape vaccination and healthcare workers won't have (shouldn't have) the tools to crosscheck information. So by all means have a "I don't trust the vaccine" as an option to opt out to make sure data is as clean and trustworthy as possible.
I'm also not talking about punishments, and I don't really know what kinds of vibes you've been reading into all of this but I'm defending the most benign and widespread healthcare mechanisms ever: add a little bit more fiction to make it opt out, use that opt-out process to collect more data, use this data to move forward with campaigns to boost confidence and adoption, and continue to increase the expectations of vaccination for access to public infrastructure in which non-vaccinated people are putting others at risk.
Saying that this would aggravate healthcare worker shortages and trigger court cases is a bit dramatic
It really seems like you're trying to pivot now from this:
Where the goal was to create friction.
If your position now is that the friction in opting out is actually just recording "why are you opting out" then that's a pretty silly definition of creating friction . You either have friction with a burdensome process that involves government spending, employees and processes or not.
It really seems like you started talking without really knowing how the system works and have now gone into "okay, I don't actually want a mandatory system, which was what the article was about and now instead I'd just like some more actionable data." Which, fine but that is absolutely not making it a mandatory system, nor is is a substantial departure from what we have.
After agreeing that mandatory vaccination probably wasn't going to work, you then wanted an opt out system, which is what we have, so you wanted it to be harder to opt out and now it's gone to "okay, you need to tick an extra box and then we'll act on that data down the road."