No Jab, No Pay: Does it actually work?

The title of this blog is borrowed from the recent Perspective, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, authored by three experts including Professor Peter McIntyre, Director of the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, The Children's Hospital at Westmead, Sydney, NSW.

Commenting on the proposed national legislation to extend this to No Jab No Play, Professor Peter McIntyre, agreed that restricting childcare could be counterproductive.  “We know that a child missing out on early childhood education opportunities is really bad in terms of later education progression,” he told MJA InSight in an exclusive podcast.  

He said that the presence of unvaccinated children in childcare centres didn’t necessarily pose a huge risk to the immunised children.  “It’s a little bit of a myth that there are these terrible disease risks that other kids will be exposed to. Childcare in general is a fantastic way to get infections, but hopefully only a small amount of those would be vaccine preventable.”

MJA Insight Article HERE

Thanks Peter for your sensible commentary. You might want to expand on why children are sick at childcare but in essence I agree. The cleverly worded 'No Jab No Play' really undermines the breadth of services and experiences provided to children attending Early Learning Services. Services considered so valuable in the growth and development of children that the same government that seeks to exclude perfectly healthy children from preschool and Childcare also included Universal Access to Preschool as part of the Families Package in the 2015 Budget with funding through 2016 and 2017.

Yet the recent budget seeks to take penalties for families who do not meet vaccination requirements one step further- “Parents who don’t vaccinate their child/ren will be $14-a-week worse off per child, with $28 set to be wiped from their family tax benefits every fortnight.

The measure, which will start from July 2018, is expected to raise $15 million over four years, while sending a tough message to those who fail or refuse to immunise their children.  Social Services Minister Christian Porter and Health Minister Greg Hunt said last week that reducing fortnightly payments instead of withholding the end-of-year supplement would serve as a constant reminder to parents to vaccinate their children.”
http://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/federal-budget/the-winners-and-losers-of-budget-2017/news-story/92fabb65ade73ac3922bfaaae1c1720a
​
No Jab No Play seeks to enforce exclusion policies, which have been in place for some time and the call for uniform national legislation was made in 1997.  It's always been a mystery to me as to why this hasn't been actioned until recently. 

In South Australia the Immunisation Unit of the Health Department told me many years ago that when a child has contracted a notifiable disease (and others in the child care centre /preschool who are unvaccinated are sent home for a period of time under the exclusion policy that has been in practice informally in most states since '97), they do not record, as a matter of priority, the vaccination status of the child with the disease. 

They stopped recording vaccine failures decades ago – that’s why every article you read about an incident or outbreak of a so-called ‘vaccine preventable disease’ fails to mention the vaccination status of those involved. The last records I have sighted are from the SA Health Department in the late 90"s. They recorded nearly 50% of the 1000 plus cases of whooping cough were in fully vaccinated children, 7% unvaccinated, and failed or chose not to record any status for the remaining 43%.
 
The Government expects to make $15 million when parents, despite all the penalties, still choose not to vaccinate? They are relying on it to be just as ineffective as NJNPay in forcing people to vaccinate their children to generate revenue.

It has been my experience in over 25 years of speaking to people that once they investigate vaccines by looking at real scientific published research and articles from people who analyse it, that they do not vaccinate and will never vaccinate.

Australian doctors know this and do not advocate punishing perfectly healthy children by refusing care. Mandatory or compulsory vaccine measures have recently been rejected in Sweden and by UK doctors who see it as harming their relationship with patients.

http://www.ageofautism.com/2017/05/sweden-votes-down-mandatory-vaccination.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-186604/Doctors-say-compulsory-vaccines.html

We gather to rally over the next two weeks because the politicians refuse to listen.
Please join us and bring loads of your friends.

​KS