Now that the U.S. has authorized Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for kids ages 5-11, children across the country are getting vaccinated. But some people are claiming that schools can vaccinate kids without their parents’ consent.
In a video by Infowars, a far-right conspiracy oriented website, host Harrison Smith said that by sending their kids to school, parents are giving schools "implied consent" to vaccinate their kids for COVID-19.
"They might send out a consent form and try to get you to sign it for your child," he said in the video. "But even if you don’t sign it, you should know that sending your child to school that day is implied consent."
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Smith cited a World Health Organization document that discussed implied consent for vaccinating kids. That’s a real document that describes three types of informed consent — written, verbal and implied — for kids to get vaccinated.
For implied consent, the document says that parents are notified of upcoming vaccinations for their kids and that the presence of their kids at a vaccination session "is considered to imply consent." It says parents are expected to take steps — like not allowing their kids to go to school on a vaccination day — if they don’t want their kids to be vaccinated.
But the Infowars video takes that WHO document out of context. For starters, the document is from 2014, long before the COVID-19 pandemic. It also isn’t meant to serve as binding rules for the world as the Infowars video suggests. Instead, it gives countries and states guidelines to consider when developing their own parental consent requirements. So WHO isn’t making the rules. Countries and states are.
In the U.S., there’s no federal requirement for informed consent relating to vaccination, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But all of the states and Washington, D.C., have rules for parental consent for kids to get vaccinated.
States do not use implied consent for vaccinations, said Stacey Lee, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins University.
"Implied consent is usually used for emergency-type situations, well-grounded in the U.S. value that we respect life, and that if you’re unconscious, you would want to live," said Lee.