[This letter was originally written in response to Mrs. Morhous’ message of 19 October, which can be found here – Ed]

Re: Measles scare at Burns Park.

Dear Ms. Morhous,

I would like to thank you, the staff at BPES, and our son’s teacher -Ms. Monts, for your cordial and professional assistance through out this ordeal.

As the one BP family, apparently, that resisted to the end the unwarranted vaccination pressure applied by the Washtenaw County Department of Public Health, we were and remain extremely upset by what happened over the past three weeks. We did our best to be polite with you and with Washtenaw County officials; and you, and they, reciprocated. That speaks well for all of us.

However, given that proper testing has shown there never was a case of Measles at the school, I see no reason to now “spin” a positive conclusion to this most unfortunate situation. It felt like the excerpts of the Public Health Department’s press release selected for your letter were doing just that. Here is another view of the matter:

I won’t argue the pros or cons surrounding the whole question of vaccinations. There are respectable opinions on both sides of that controversy. The law simply grants parents the final say on whether their children should be vaccinated while the Health Department gets final responsibility for responding to community health threats. There is something of a balance in that.

What the law does not do is grant the County, the Schools, or the Parents for that matter, the right to use helpless children as pawns in arguing or enforcing their own points of view on this matter. Getting to the point, there has to be some medical justification for excluding children from school and for allowing them to return; A policy of vaccination enforcement in not enough.

As far as I can see, the policies used in this case warrant more scrutiny at this point than the comfort of a happy ending. I am not just talking about the fact that the original lab tests were wrong. I fully believe that everyone was acting in good faith – although a few lab techs somewhere must surely be hiding their faces at this moment. No, I question the medical policies from the beginning when 17 Burns Park children were excluded from school. We never got a clear answer to such questions despite our best efforts to make peace with the decision.

From day one the exclusion was labeled as being for “our child’s own good” because an unvaccinated child has a greater chance of contracting a disease. But if true, and that remains a matter of contention, then unvaccinated children are always under greater risk. The law puts “a child’s own good” in the hands of his or her parents. This is an example where well meaning “spin” only served to frustrate and anger a family to whom it was directed.

Logic and a simple process of elimination tells us that the more medically defendable reason for excluding an unvaccinated child is the greater probability that he or she could in fact be a carrier. A disease like Measles spreads because its period of contagiousness begins before outward symptoms. The Health Department must do its best to prevent an outbreak and had reason to believe unvaccinated children pose a greater risk of being carriers.

But the last thing on earth that a School or a County Health Department should do, in my opinion, to a child feared to be an unsuspecting carrier of some disease, if to pressure the family of that child to go out and have the child vaccinated! To begin with, it is basic practice not to vaccinate a patient that is already ill. The policy to allow excluded children back into school if they got vaccinated seems, therefore, more driven by inappropriate policy enforcement than by medical prudence. And yet, 16 out of 17 families succumbed to this pressure and at least one child developed a severe reaction from which he has yet to recover.

And for what? There is no cure for Measles. Apart from the danger posed by vaccinating an already infected child, it is not as if an over-night vaccination would cure that child from being a potential carrier. Although we wanted our child back in school, and made peace with our civic duty to keep him out, we once again felt frustrated and angry by the unprincipled basis for the policies we were suffering under. I can see integrity in the view of a Health Department that sees newly vaccinated children as posing reduced risk of future infection. That has been their position all along. But making vaccination a condition for re-admittance from past exposure is something that we and 16 other families deserve a better explanation for.

In closing, I would like to clarify that I am actually not an anti-vaccination devotee. In fact, this topic finds heated dissension even within our family. But, while the courteous and supportive handling of this incident on the part of the School and the County made it easier for us to all get through it, the basic facts of the case, and the questions that remain regarding the policies that were implemented, hardly seem like something we should be celebrating or bringing to an early close.

Thank you for listening and thank you once again for your assistance over the past weeks.

Sincerely,

Gregg Alf