Italian children under six who haven’t had their compulsory vaccinations will be turned away from school – and their parents fined up to €500 – under a new law.
Older unvaccinated children can’t legally be turned away from school, but their parents will be fined. The ‘Lorenzin law’, named after the former Italian health minister, requires kids to have 10 immunisations before attending school preventing illnesses including measles, mups, rubella, chicken pox and polio.
The law is part of Italy’s drive to increase vaccination rates to be in line with the World Health Organisation’s target of 95% – enough to prevent diseases spreading while allowing children whose immune systems are too compromised for vaccinating to go without.
The law came in the wake of measles outbreaks – 5,000 people in Italy got the illness last year, and four died.
The government, which had initially opposed the Lorenzin law, reversed that position after what it called “a measles emergency”, and criticism from health experts accusing the anti-vaccination movement of “sending Italy back to the Middle Ages”.
The deadline for parents to arrange vaccinations and get relevant paperwork updated was extended to Monday 11 March, and hundreds of letters of suspension have reportedly already been sent out by local authorities. “Now everyone has had time to catch up,” Health Minister Giulia Grillo told La Repubblica newspaper, according to the BBC. “No vaccine, no school”.
Last month, an eight-year-old cancer survivor in Rome had to be kept out of school because of the risk posed by unvaccinated children in his class. His immune system was compromised as he was recovering from leukaemia.
In January this year, the government in Australia introduced new regulations which allowed the Health Department to ban unvaccinated and under-vaccinated children from going to school during disease outbreaks. Since 1 January, nurseries, schools, and childcare centres have been required to collect and report on the immunisation status of children in their care.
Italy isn’t the only country struggling with outbreaks of these diseases. Measles cases tripled across Europe between 2017 and 2018 – there were 900 cases of measles in the UK last year, three times the 2017 figure (the current UK MMR vaccination rate for under-twos is 91.2%, below the WHO recommendation).
The anti-vaccination movement largely stemmed from a small, discredited study by former doctor Andrew Wakefield – who was struck off the medical register for unethical behaviour. The study, later described by the British Medical Journal as “an elaborate fraud” and by The Lancet as “utterly false”, claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism – a link numerous subsequent studies have found to not exist.