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vaccination mandatory in France

Accepted submission by Anonymous Coward at 2015-03-20 16:20:16
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This may be relevant to the SoylentNews community. In France, they've just confirmed that vaccination is mandatory, and parents will be fined and sent to jail if they don't get their kids vaccinated. The reasoning is as follows: the state has the right to legislate to protect individual and collective health, so it has the right to impose vaccination (I *think* that's the correct general translation).
Just in case it matters: my own opinion is that vaccination should be obligatory, as long as there is a clear consensus about it in the medical community. Obviously there are comments to be made about this (for instance how much we can trust for-profit makers of vaccines), but assuming well-intended doctors and vaccine makers, that's my opinion.

The source article can be found at http://www.metronews.fr/info/pour-les-sages-le-vaccin-obligatoire-est-conforme-a-la-constitution/moct!Sii8SUHfK2TS/ [metronews.fr] [french].
In short, a pair of parents decided they weren't going to vaccinate their kids against polio, diphtheria and tetanus, and they said the state didn't have the right to force them.
More about the vaccine on the wiki page on dTP: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccin_dipht%C3%A9rique,_t%C3%A9tanique_et_poliomy%C3%A9litique [ ‭wikipedia.org (Warning: Unicode in URL)⁩ ] (interestingly, the english language version of the same page, chosen from the left menu, says the P from DPT comes from pertussis, not polio).
An older article about the parents in question, in English this time: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-02-04/how-france-is-handling-its-own-vaccine-debate. [bloomberg.com]

Note for editors: you should put some information about what languages you can read, so that submitters can figure out how much of a translation you need in order to follow the links.

Original Submission