The draft of a new law on children's groups, which could help parents reconcile family and work life, is calculated to cover the costs of services for vaccinated children only. This is not medically justified and would lead to the exclusion of children with an individual vaccination calendar that falls outside of the necessary schedule to be eligible for the children's groups. The League of Human Rights considers the mandate of vaccination as disproportionate and discriminatory and proposes to the members of the Czech Parliament that the decision should be left to the service provider.
Dr. Jan Vavrečka, who works for the consumer protection association Unicampus, highlights the lack of reasoning for the medical necessity of the measure, and says clarification is needed for exactly who is protected by this measure: "Enforcement of compulsory vaccination of the child as a condition of its inclusion in a children's group has not been properly medically justified. Is it because of the protection of the health of unvaccinated children from the risk of a vaccinated group of children, or is the unvaccinated child considered a risk for vaccinated children? Whose health and rights are supposed to be protected by such measures? I find absolutely unacceptable that, as a result of a violation of the law by a parent, the child is sanctioned, without justification on grounds of really urgent medical need."
However, it is not just about completely unvaccinated children - they are exceptions - but it is more about children with friendlier vaccination schemes that may leave them without all vaccinations at the time of wanting to join a children's group. Such schemes are often decided by educated and well-informed parents - precisely the parents that children's groups should be designed for, helping facilitate their return to work. The belief that requiring vaccinations is an unnecessary demand is confirmed by the situation in neighboring Germany and Austria, where no vaccination is required for access to kindergarten or other children's groups. According to existing experience with informal groups of children (such as a parent club or university children's corner), there is no evidence that the presence of incompletely vaccinated children introduces any risk to the other children.
"Imposing the necessity of vaccination as a condition for participation in children's groups does not contribute to the stated protection of children's health, but exactly the opposite. It will lead to circumvention of the law, falsifying medical records and distortion of the data on vaccination coverage. In the case of extension of some disease, information about the actual vaccination coverage will not be available and because of that it will not be possible to take appropriate measures to prevent the spread of the disease," warns Zuzana Candigliota, a lawyer for the League of Human Rights. The League of Human Rights compiled an amendment with detailed reasoning to be passed along to MPs.
