Parents should not be coerced into vaccinating kids

In Late 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the first COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use in adults. In May 2021, the Pfizer vaccine became the first authorized for children as young as 12. The threshold may be lower by the start of the new school year this fall. How can parents begin to think through a vaccination decision for children?

Medical decisions such as COVID-19 vaccination should not be based primarily on external pressures. Reason, reliable information, and prayerful discernment are the pillars of sound decisions. No one should succumb to feelings that they “have to” vaccinate or refuse to vaccinate their child. For example, a propagandistic term like “vaccine hesitancy” might be used to “nudge” people toward vaccination. This would constitute undue influence, casting those who may be waiting for more reliable medical information about the vaccines in a negative light as if they were indecisive, irrational, or—worse still—indifferent to the well-being of others. We should be on guard against “shaming” or other forms of undue pressure to accept or refuse a vaccine, particularly when these pressures bear upon our fears, sense of self-worth, or feelings of guilt.

Whichever option parents conclude is good for their children, we should all be united in fighting one colossal form of external pressure: mandating COVID-19 vaccines as a condition for attending school. Vaccines that are still in Phase III clinical trials with no more than one year of long-term follow-up in adults should not be required as a condition for school attendance, especially when children face little risk from COVID-19. Studies involving millions of children in school settings have found minimal transmission of the disease among children and virtually no mortality. Teachers are more at risk of teacher-to-teacher transmission than child-to-teacher transmission.

The Catholic Church’s highest doctrinal body confirmed in December 2020 that vaccination must be voluntary. The ethical principle that medical decisions must be adequately informed and free of coercion has been affirmed repeatedly in international law, including in the 1947 Nuremburg Code and the 2005 Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. Mandating the use of unapproved and unlicensed biologics that are available under FDA emergency use authorizations (EUAs) is disastrously imprudent at best.

If the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) were to revoke its declaration of a public health emergency, then all EUAs would automatically be rescinded, and the unlicensed vaccines could no longer be used. Mandating their use in children as a condition for access to education is profoundly unjust. Parents should be ready to communicate this to their children’s schools and to investigate legal options if schools are unresponsive.

To serve the spiritual well-being of our families and communities, including the Church as a whole, we should avoid division based on vaccination decisions. Parents will make different decisions about COVID vaccines with respect to their own children, seeking and navigating reliable information and advice as best they can with prayer and prudence. This is no light task, so we must build one another up in the Lord and be at peace with one another, as St. Paul says (see 1 Thess 5:11-13).

Our Lord taught that a house divided against itself cannot stand (see Matt 3:25). We must not feed a new class narrative based on “vaccinated” versus “unvaccinated” status, ostracizing and ghettoizing one another, particularly within families. Let us instead be united in the Lord and in the defense of adequately informed and voluntary medical decisions, free of coercive influences that undermine the dignity of the human person and do not serve the common good.

JOHN A. DI CAMILLO, PH.D., BE.L., is a staff ethicist at The National Catholic Bioethics Center. He applies Catholic moral theology to science and medicine through writing, speaking, and fielding hundreds of individual and organizational consultations each year. He lives in Lancaster County, PA, with his wife, Serena, and their six children.