They are not generally against vaccination, but against governmental coercion. Families with small children want to have the new measles vaccination in Karlsruhe checked. Several rights were violated.
Karlsruhe (dpa) - Representatives of several families with small children submitted urgent applications and constitutional complaints against the law on measles vaccination to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe on Sunday.
They are not opposed to the vaccination itself, but to the constraint that no longer allows a self-determined decision based on "appropriate, independent and neutral information". "We see the fundamental right to physical integrity of the children, the right of parents to educate and the principles of equality to be violated," said one of her attorneys, the state lawyer Stephan Rixen from Bayreuth.
To strengthen protection against highly infectious measles, children in daycare centers and schools have had to be vaccinated since Sunday. Parents must now demonstrate that their children have been vaccinated before admission. For children already attending daycare or school, proof must be provided by July 31, 2021. Violators face a fine of up to 2500 euros.
The obligation to vaccinate should also apply to teachers and educators as well as to staff in medical facilities such as clinics. Measles vaccinations are also mandatory for residents and employees in asylum accommodation.
The complainants are four families from Hesse, Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. In two cases in which the parents have to return to work after parental leave and for which childcare is existential, urgent applications have been applied for.
Further constitutional complaints are in preparation - including families whose children come to school in the summer. A pediatrician from Saxony and a pediatrician from Baden-Württemberg also want to sue: because of the state intervention in the doctor-patient relationship.
The parents are supported by the "Initiative for Free Vaccination Decisions" and the association "Doctors for Individual Vaccination Decisions". supported. They complain: Parents who decide against the measles vaccination or who only want to vaccinate later are deprived of any means of external care for their children.
The coupling of the vaccination requirement to daycare access is a disproportionate burden, said her representative Rixen. Unlike measles, there is no acute threat to measles, in Germany there is already a very high vaccination rate and comparatively few diseases.
The time of vaccination was "the earliest in the world and not sufficiently justified by scientific studies". It is also criticized that there is no single vaccine according to the example of Switzerland against measles, but only multiple vaccines (measles, mumps and rubella or measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox). The law thus includes vaccination against mumps and rubella and possibly also against chickenpox. "Thus, the vaccine manufacturers decide on the structure of the obligation to vaccinate," said the complainants.
The law also violates the principle of equality. For example, the obligation to vaccinate only applies to new daycare children, but existing children still have a deadline until July 2021. It is also unequal treatment that a daycare child and a child had to be vaccinated by a childminder - a child who was given by the childminder is not looked after in the parents' rooms.
It is not yet clear when the Federal Constitutional Court will decide on urgent applications and constitutional complaints.
