Only vaccinated children could be allowed into schools, suggests top Polish health official

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Poland’s chief sanitary inspector, Paweł Grzesiowski, has suggested that children could only be permitted to attend school if they have received all mandatory vaccinations. He has also announced an unprecedented inspection and digitisation of the vaccination records of all children in Poland.

The developments come after an unvaccinated child was admitted to hospital in Wrocław this month with diptheria, a disease that it is obligatory in Poland to vaccinate against. Recent years have, however, seen a rapid growth in the number of parents refusing to vaccinate their children.

This is “the first case of severe diphtheria in an unvaccinated child in many years in Poland”, said Grzesiowski at a press conference on Tuesday. He noted that the six-year-old child had developed the illness after returning from Africa.

Diphtheria can often be fatal in young children. The infected child in Wrocław remains in serious condition, with Grzesiowski revealing that he has been placed into an induced coma. An adult who had close contact with the child has also been hospitalised with a milder case of the disease.

In an interview with broadcaster TVN on Thursday, Grzesiowski argued that action needs to be taken to ensure that parents comply with the requirement to give their children mandatory vaccinations.

He noted that currently, although parents can in theory be fined for failing to do so, the legal process can “last several years and it does not work”. Parents are able to “not vaccinate their child and not have any major problems because of it”.

To improve the situation, “we would have to change the entire system, rebuilding it in such a way that an unvaccinated child would have to have difficult access to various elements of social life, such as preschool or school or any other where a large group could be infected”, said Grzesiowski.

But he admitted that this would be difficult “because in the Polish legal system everyone has the right to use preschool or school – this is guaranteed by the constitution – so there are no simple solutions here”.

Article 70 of Poland’s constitution states that: “Everyone shall have the right to education. Education to 18 years of age shall be compulsory.” Some lawmakers have previously proposed banning unvaccinated children from nurseries and preschools, a measure already implemented by a handful of local authorities.

Speaking to TVN, Grzesiowski said that any such measures would not be about depriving children of education but of deciding how that education takes place. “Can a child take part in group glasses or will they have to have an individual course of care or education,” he said.

However, Grzesiowski emphasised that above all it is crucial that parents receive reliable information in order to disabuse them of the idea that vaccines harm, rather than help, children.

Poland, like other countries, has seen a rapid rise in the number of parents refusing compulsory vaccinations for their children. The number of such cases rose from 3,437 in 2010 to 87,344 – a more than 25-fold increase.

As a result, the number of children being vaccinated against some diseases, such as measles, has fallen below the 95% threshold required for herd immunity. In 2017, the level had dropped to 93% and is now even lower. Last year, Poland saw a surge in measles infections.

In a separate interview on Thursday with broadcaster Radio Zet, Grzesiowski also revealed that his organisation, the Chief Sanitary Inspectorate (GIS), will in the coming weeks launch its first-ever inspection of the vaccination records of all children in Poland.

Inspectors will manually check around 7.5 million records. “This system is still based on paper documents, so the inspector must go to the vaccination point and check by looking at each vaccination card,” explained Grzesiowski.

As part of the inspection, the data will be transferred to an electronic system, making it easier in the future to check who has been vaccinated and against which diseases.

Those plans drew criticism from the far-right Confederation (Konfederacja) party, which has long opposed many forms of compulsory vaccination. One of the party’s MPs, Jacek Wilk, called on parents to submit declarations saying they do not consent to the sharing of their children’s medical data.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.