In a pandemic, conflict about vaccinating children can be “significantly polarizing,” according to a judge of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta.
That is especially true when the opposing parties are parents with shared custody asking a court to break their deadlock.
The Alberta judge’s
mid-December decision to let a mother vaccinate her two children without the consent of their anti-vaccine father illustrates what has become the usual judicial response.
One parent wants to vaccinate their child in a pandemic. The other denies the pandemic even exists. One parent follows provincial public health advice. The other claims pandemic information from the government is propaganda, and demands to put the pandemic on trial.
It is becoming a common conflict, in which Canadian judges have recently come down just as hard on vaccine denialists as they regularly do on other conspiracy theorists who present misinformation to courts, such as Freemen on the Land. A string of recent rulings favour public health advice against pseudolegal challenges that sometimes even cite Nazi atrocities of human experimentation to a degree that one Saskatchewan judge called “offensive.” ...
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