Mom Upset After Son Receives Flu Vaccine Without Her Consent

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An Idaho third-grader received a flu vaccine at his public school without parental consent last week — the result of a “mix-up,” according to the West Ada School District — leaving angry mom Letisha Huff wanting answers from officials there.

“These are our children, they’re not guinea pigs,” Huff tells local news station KTVB. “Either get it right, or don’t do it at all.” Yahoo Parenting was not able to reach Huff for additional comment.

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But school district spokesperson Eric Exline says that Huff’s son Zachary, 8, inadvertently received the FluMist vaccine when the signed permission slip of another Zachary in his class — who was absent that day — was mistaken as his. Current procedure for the pilot program has slips signed by parents going from student to teacher to nurse, who double checks each child’s medical records for red flags such as asthma. Then the slips go back to the classroom, where they are doled out to kids who must bring their signed form with them to the in-school clinic for their vaccine. To insure a mix-up like this doesn’t happen again, Exline tells Yahoo Parenting, “We’re working on adding an extra step at the classroom level.”

Still, says Huff, who explains she’s not against the flu vaccine but that she’d wanted it administered in a doctor’s office, “This isn’t something we should be practicing. They should know what they’re doing.”

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Schools have been known to occasionally vaccinate minors without parental consent, upsetting parents — pro-vaccine or not — because of their lack of control in the situation. In 2012, a 14-year-old public-school student in Detroit was given four shots, including one for HPV, without permission from home; shortly thereafter, the girl developed a severe rash, leaving her mother “angry with everybody” for administering vaccines she “never wanted her to have.” Last year in Canada, a 14-year-old girl was given tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis inoculations at her school without either a medical background check or parental consent; her parents were shocked and upset to learn that the law there does not require consent for kids 14 and over. And two New York City students received a swine flu vaccination without parental consent back in 2009, a misstep that prompted a city health department official to pledge they were working “to implement additional safeguards.”

Though typically done in error, shots administered at school without parental consent raises an issue that goes beyond parents’ personal vaccine philosophies, according to Alan Phillips, a national vaccine-rights attorney based in North Carolina. “Even for parents who want their child vaccinated, when the school does it without their permission, they wonder: What else will they do without my permission? It’s the slippery-slope idea,” Phillips tells Yahoo Parenting. “It raises a very important constitutional issue, which is that parents have a fundamental right — under the 14^th amendment, as has been interpreted by the Supreme Court in long line of past cases — to parent their children. That includes medical decision-making, with various exceptions in the law including emergencies and other compelling reasons… But a flu shot is not a compelling reason [to make an exception].”

One reason parents want to be involved in the decision over their child’s vaccinations, Phillips notes, is because of the possibility of rare side effects, or of adverse reactions that could be triggered by asthma or egg allergies. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program paid out more than $202 million to parties claiming vaccine injuries in the government’s fiscal year 2014; claimants pointed to the flu vaccine in 1,527 injuries and 79 deaths, with 863 of those awarded compensation by the government, according to NVIC statistics. Because of that, Phillips notes, parents “should have the right to make an informed choice.”

But in 2011, California passed a state law allowing minors 12 years and over to request and receive vaccines for Hepatitis B and HPV without parental consent; North Carolina has a similar law, and one has been proposed for New York.

“It’s a big privacy issue. Parenting is very personal,” John Whitehead, founder of the civil liberties legal organization the Rutherford Institute, tells Yahoo Parenting. “Vaccines may be important, but a parent should at least be notified. Because if the government can stick needles in people without parental notice, at least, it would seem as though the state is taking over as parent.”