August 11, 2022
A recent video has been circulating online, and it has sparked citizen outrage for good reason. In a news report from Fox 11, the Los Angeles Unified School District is now facing a lawsuit, allegedly for bribing a 13-year-old, to get himself vaccinated for Covid-19 without his mother’s consent. Ridiculous as it sounds, the so-called bribe came in the form of pizza.
A visibly worried Maribel Duarte shared how her child “wasn’t the same anymore,” even adding that he doesn’t sleep well and doesn’t exercise the way he did. She also claimed that the child was coerced into forging his mother’s signature. Duarte and her attorney are now filing a lawsuit after a damage claim was apparently ignored by the Barack Obama Global Prep Academy and the school’s district.
A concerned audience of citizens is closely following the developments of this bit of news, and suffice it to say, we will eventually see where this goes. But more importantly, it puts a number of things into perspective.
On the one hand, we are all called to view things from the perspective of a parent. In this case, it seems we are looking at a mother who is not sold on the whole idea of vaccination. In this regard, she is right to feel violated.
On the other hand, there’s a school whose action trickles down from an overarching view that comes from the government – that having people vaccinated will save their lives. The point here is that there are believers in vaccination who will do what they can to have other people vaccinated, no matter what gets in their way.
When these two sides are weighed, they fall under the scrutiny of the law. And obviously, the law says that for a young child to get vaccinated, he needs parental consent. That simply is how straightforward the law is.
Seems to be clear-cut, doesn’t it? Whether you agree with it or not, this is how our justice system is defined.
The debate rages on, and while we’re at it, we seem to forget what really caused it in the first place. We must remind ourselves that the global pandemic was caused by a single viral agent developed specifically to put the world in shambles. Apparently, there’s still a global investigation going on as to who should be held accountable – and we’re not going to see the end of it soon.
Right now we’re faced with settling for the next best thing, which is that we co-exist with the virus. The only way we see that happening is if we find a vaccine that truly works. And yet we must remind ourselves that the creation of an effective vaccine takes time. You might be surprised that the 200-year-old common cold, which is something that we’re very familiar with, has no specific vaccine yet. The Covid-19 pandemic has been around for less than 3 years. This means that not enough time has passed for us to definitively determine if these vaccines that had been rolled out in the past couple of years would have any ill effects in the long term.
Like it or not, anti-vaxxers have a valid reason for believing the way they do. In like manner, the government has no choice but to continue with its vaccine drive. The children need to be protected, because they are not invulnerable to the disease, even if based on demographics, most of them are resilient against the virus.
For the time being, the law stands. We should adhere to it, whether we agree with it or not. But what is scary is the move to pass bills like AB 2098, which effectively states that when children the age of 12 are not given vaccination consent by their parents, they can decide to be vaccinated on their own. Further, the bill seeks to penalize any doctor who strays away from the government’s vaccination narrative, by removing their medical license. We understand the government’s drive for full vaccination, but this bill might be an overreach on their part if it’s passed. It’s like them saying that they know all about the virus and its implications inside and out.
That the issue has gone on for a while now only means that the points raised on various sides hold some validity in some way. Let’s all please have an intelligent conversation about it. We don’t get to stop talking about this really important issue until we arrive at something that works.
In the meantime, don’t force anything upon anyone. Let the parents have the final say.
