Parents Who Don’t Vaccinate Their Kids Should Pay A ‘Sin Tax’

Last week, President Trump met with his Australian counterpart, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, on the USS Intrepid in New York. Beyond smoothing over a tense phone call and a hostile tweet from January, reports say that they discussed topics like ISIS, North Korea, global security, and tightening immigration policy. Relations were mended, and Trump even said to an audience that Australia has "better healthcare than we do," just hours after the American Healthcare Act passed the House.

But perhaps if Turnbull and Trump were speaking in private, the Australian prime minister would have pushed the envelope, and pressed Trump to change his mind on vaccines—a tool of global security in an increasingly connected world. After all, the US is facing a dangerous resurgence of diseases once thought to be long behind us (witness Minnesota's current outbreak of the potentially deadly measles virus, the worst in three decades).

Since taking office two years ago, Turnbull has aggressively pushed back against the powerful anti-vaccine movement that created a foothold in Australia in the early 1990s, driving immunization rates down to near 70 percent in many parts of the country. Outbreaks of measles, still classified as an eliminated disease in Australia, have since become an annual event, triggered by gatherings of large crowds like dance festivals. The worst of these episodes happened in 2012, infecting 168 people in a string of suburbs outside of Sydney.

Directly responding to these outbreaks, Turnbull's government passed a controversial amendment to Australia's key social services legislation which went into effect in January last year, called No Jab, No Pay—withholding child care benefits of up to $11,500 to families who refused to vaccinate their children by March 2016, unless given a medical exemption. (A jab is common vernacular in British or Australian English for immunizations, similar in use to shot in American English.) The premise of the policy was simple; fiscal blackmail would convince enough vaccine skeptics to reconsider the merits of vaccines, pushing immunization rates up to at least above 95 percent—the threshold commonly accepted by experts to confer herd immunity to a community against highly-contagious viruses like measles.

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