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Labour MP's MMR proposal 'a breach of human rights'

Some parents still refuse to give their children an MMR jabSome parents still refuse to give their children an MMR jab

Tuesday, 13, May 2008 12:00

Opposition parties and pressure groups have lambasted suggestions from Labour MP Mary Creagh that parents should be forced to inoculate their children.

Ms Creagh wrote in the Fabian Society magazine that pupils who had not had the controversial MMR vaccine should be prevented from starting school.

But Stuart Jeffery, Green party health spokesman, described the proposal as "shocking" and "inherently discriminatory".

He continued: "A child's access to education is a fundamental human right, and one that must not be based on any external conditions, such as medical intervention. This proposal would effectively be holding a child's future to ransom.

"Forcing parents to have their children inoculated through fines and conditional terms is discriminatory and an infringement of human rights."

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"If anyone tried to enforce this with my children I would simply pull them out of the state system whilst challenging my children's breach of human rights in the European court. I work with children with autism and there is too much evidence to suggest vaccines do cause this in some children as well as mitochondrial disfunction (which I suffer from myself) I wouldn't wish either condition on any child or family. "All presidential candidates in the US are pledging to look into link between vaccines and autism, why is the UK not doing the same? Autism is up from 1:10,000 in the 80s to 1:150 today, that doesn't include ADHD. Does the government have no concept of the long-term effect this will have on our whole society? They should come and do my job." Leise Stephenson, Bristol

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