The Right to Refuse Vaccination 
by Diderik Finne

The right to refuse medical treatment is self evident, yet under current state law parents do not have the right to refuse vaccination for their children.  Vaccination entails some risk.  Vaccines contain toxic ingredients, such as bacterial toxins, formalin (a solution of formaldehyde, water and methanol), and additives such as aluminum hydroxide, ammonium sulfate, thimerosol and polysorbate 80.   

Who bears the risk of vaccination?  The parents.  Risk assessment is inherently subjective.  If the state requires you to take a medication, can it justify itself by arguing that the risk is negligible?  Is it not the one who bears the risk who has the right to assess it? 

We recognize that the federal government has the right to impose risk on citizens when national security is threatened. Can mandatory vaccination be justified in this way? 

Vaccinated individuals are theoretically protected against a targeted disease.  Thus, there is no danger to vaccinated individuals from those who choose not to be vaccinated. 

In modern epidemics of measles, chickenpox and other immunizable diseases, actually, at least half the individuals affected have been vaccinated.  According to Dr. Atkinson of the Center for Disease Control, “measles transmission has been clearly documented among vaccinated persons.  In some large outbreaks […] over 95 percent of cases have a history of vaccination.”¹ 

Thus, even the argument that vaccination could have saved people from getting sick or dying is fraudulent. 

The following excerpt from “Ethical Issues in End-of-Life Care” (Cancer Control: Journal of the Moffitt Cancer Center), clearly confirms the right of a competent adult to refuse unwanted medical intervention: 

The right to refuse medical treatment is well established in medicine and in law. The legal tradition of the right to be left alone has deep roots. When cases arose asserting that a patient has a right to be free of unwanted medical intervention, the right was readily recognized and clearly affirmed. These legal cases can be categorized into four classifications: (1) the patient with decision-making capacity, (2) the patient without capacity but who had earlier expressed treatment preferences for end-of-life care either verbally or in a written advance directive document, (3) the patient without capacity who had made no prior expression of treatment preferences, and (4) the patient who never had the capacity to make treatment decisions. In cases of patients with intact decision-making capacity, courts have ruled that such patients have the right to refuse medical interventions even when those interventions are life-sustaining. In Satz v Perlmutter,^[8] a competent ventilator-dependent patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis wanted his ventilator discontinued and was allowed by the court to direct physicians to remove the ventilator.

A patient's right to refuse treatment, whether exercised directly or by proxy, is not an absolute right. Many state courts have identified four social interests that must be balanced against a person's right to be free of unwanted medical intervention. These are the preservation of life, the prevention of suicide, the protection of third parties, and the preservation of the ethical integrity of the medical profession. In most treatment refusal cases, these state interests are not found to outweigh a competent adult's right to refuse unwanted medical intervention. However, in some cases, the right to refuse treatment is overridden. An example of this is a court-ordered blood transfusion to save the life of a single-parent Jehovah's Witness who would leave minor children as wards of the state if life-saving transfusion is withheld. In cases such as this, many courts have held that the state's interest in protecting the children outweighs the parent's right to refuse unwanted transfusion, even though the reason for refusing is based on a deeply held religious belief.