Germany’s health minister announced Thursday that the country’s policy of inoculating all children against measles — regardless of whether or not they were vaccinated — was temporarily being suspended.
The move comes two weeks after a highly contagious outbreak of measles swept through a German town and neighboring countries, killing 14 people and sending health officials scrambling to contain the outbreak. Almost 4,000 people have been vaccinated and tested since the outbreak began in December.
Reinhard Born, health minister for the state of Bavaria and a national board member for the Christian Social Union, which is the party from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats, said on Twitter: “We all know that a health policy with no restrictions in public is therefore forbidden in Germany, and I now think we should immediately stop the emergency measles vaccination program until we can ensure that the situation is controlled.”
The statement sparked widespread dismay among parents in Germany, with a large online protest in the majority-Catholic country, and at least one teenager the victim of anti-vaccine threats after he posted a photograph of himself with his measles-containing sticker removed.
In Germany, all children must receive two doses of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine by the time they enter school to prevent them from becoming susceptible to the highly contagious virus.
But rules under which parents opt out of the vaccination by requesting that children be enrolled in a home-based vaccine inoculation program, which also in some cases means sending them to religious camps and weekend retreats, have emerged as a source of friction for parents.
Exceptions have become commonplace in many countries, with tens of thousands of immunized children left unprotected against measles in Finland and Slovakia, and large-scale outbreaks of measles in Canada and the U.S. But the current measles outbreak in Germany drew national attention, exposing a division among families about whether vaccination is necessary.
Children have also reportedly died after receiving an untested combination measles-mumps-rubella vaccine over the past decade.
The Vaccine Information Center in Germany reported that the country’s economy stood to lose $87 million in health services associated with the outbreak, but researchers from University of California, Berkeley, cautioned that those figures were lower than an actual economic loss. The toll instead attributed to the fact that parents weren’t vaccinating or intentionally under-vaccinating their children.