In January, Department of Health and Human Services head Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Trump’s slashed the number of routinely recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11 after an HHS report emphasized “personal autonomy and self-determination” as key principles necessitating reconsideration of the childhood vaccine schedule.
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Pushback against such policies from those who support school vaccine requirements — as I do — typically emphasizes that failure to vaccinate a child can jeopardize not only his or her own health, but that of other children in the classroom, including some who may not be able to be vaccinated. It’s not only a matter of personal autonomy, the argument might go: Our choices have impacts on others.
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The principle of autonomy is rightly sacrosanct in medicine, although even it has limits, which gives rise to multitude ethical quandaries in my field of intensive care unit medicine, and other disciplines. But such controversies are incidental to the debate over school vaccine mandates. When it comes to childhood vaccine recommendations or requirements, “personal autonomy” is little more than a red herring.
