Vaccines have saved the lives of billions of people around the world in the last two centuries but “through ignorance, recklessness, unconsciousness and bad faith”, as it says Joan Manel Serrat in his song Plain to the sea (in Catalan), there seem to be many people dedicated to vilifying them.
The Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court, as this newspaper reported this week, has issued a ruling in which it endorses the competence of an educational center to decide that a student does not go to class because he is not vaccinated and in which, in addition, it rejects that this decision implies an attack on the student’s personal freedom. With this, it has upheld the appeal presented by the Generalitat of Catalonia against a ruling by the Catalan Superior Court of Justice that considered that an institute in Barcelona had violated the fundamental rights of an unvaccinated student who, faced with Covid-19 infection, He imposed a ten-day home quarantine on him.
This ruling is aligned with the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court throughout 2023, when through twenty sentences it endorsed the decisions of courts and hearings of thirteen provinces in favor of the inoculation of the vaccine against covid-19 to minors and people with disabilities, when those who exercise parental authority or are guardians have opposed it in court.
This has great relevance from a public health point of view just after everything we have experienced during the covid-19 pandemic (an estimated 19.8 million deaths were avoided in the first year alone after the introduction of the vaccines -from December 8, 2020 to December 8, 2021-) and when they are being given two major measles outbreaks in the United Kingdom and Romania, something that Spain is getting rid of thanks to the fact that it enjoys an almost perfect protective shield due to its high vaccine coverage rates (the average exceeds 95%).
By the way, it has just been confirmed that vaccines against human papilloma virus (HPV) manage to reduce the incidence of cervical cancer: in a Scottish observational study, no case of invasive cancer has been recorded in women (born between January 1, 1988 and June 5, 1996) who were immunized at 12 or 13 years of age.
This phrase from Jaime Pérezpresident of the Spanish Association of Vaccinology-AEV, should appear framed at the doors of all educational centers: “Vaccines are a right and, at the same time, a duty. As an individual you have the right to protect yourself, but you also have the “duty to get vaccinated to cut the possible chains of transmission of viruses and bacteria” (XI Symposium of the AEV, 11/9/2023. This, at the same time that circulars are issued and health talks are organized for parents with the aim of combating the misinformation.
Unless parents and/or legal guardians tempted to break the collective protective shield, against their children and those of others, they have to think twice before doing it.
2024-01-28 08:00:00
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