forcement of the law for specific reasons such as religious beliefs against vaccination. Further, those children attending home schools were not covered by the law. Thus, the exemptions built into the law assured that the 100 percent vaccination objective of the law would not be met.
Parents object to mandatory vaccination for their children on a variety of grounds. Most of these reasons are philosophical or legal in character, i.e., freedom of choice, religious beliefs, logical interpretations of vaccine effectiveness, right of privacy, anti-government sentiments, and so forth. For some people, the costs associated with immunizations also provide a reason to object to mandatory immunizations. In many instances, however, people who object to mandatory immunizations do so on the basis of misleading information concerning vaccines that describes the efficacy and risks associated with vaccines in terms that are contrary to established and verified facts. This problem was illustrated well in an article that appeared in The New Republic in 1998, in which Arthur Allen reported that:
President Clinton's ongoing initiative to immunize every American child against infectious disease seems like the kind of safe-as-milk, baby-step health policy that everyone should love. The ultimate motherhood issue. But Clinton, presumably, didn't consult Len Horowitz. A former dentist-turned-"healthcare motivational speaker," Horowitz is carving out a new niche in the history of the paranoid style in American politics. His message: The aids and Ebola epidemics resulted from the contamination·possibly intentional·of common vaccines by the military-medico-industrial complex. The Rockefeller Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control, famed AIDS researcher Dr. Robert Gallo, and·yes·Henry Kissinger all figure in Horowitz's gallery of germ-warfare conspirators. Horowitz, who apparently honed his expertise on such matters by drilling teeth in Gl...