Childhood illness is too harmless a word for what the measles virus can do to young and certainly older people. Otitis media is one of the more common, although less dangerous, complications; if the pathogen spreads to the lungs and brain, it becomes life-threatening. There has been a vaccine since the 1960s, but vaccination has not yet been compulsory in Germany.
Politicians have chosen a different path. Proof of vaccination has been required at community facilities such as day-care centers and schools for two years. If it is missing, the visit can be banned or there is a risk of a fine because compulsory schooling does not allow a ban. The Bundestag took a similar approach when it prescribed vaccination for nursing staff during the Covid pandemic. In fact, you can make your own decisions. But if you say no, it means: get out of the job, out of the day care center.
The Federal Constitutional Court is to be thanked for the clear statement that one and the other amounts to the same thing, namely a de facto obligation to be immunized by injection. Nevertheless, the Federal Constitutional Court has now – as before with the corona vaccination obligation in hospitals and doctor’s offices – allowed the legislative interference in public health with measles and rejected complaints from families.
Little can be gained from the decision for future corona policy. The court reaffirms its view that political actions can only be controlled to a limited extent in view of the uncertainties. And such also exist with the measles virus, which only rarely spreads but, unlike in other countries, cannot yet be considered eliminated in Germany. Otherwise virus and virus are difficult to compare with each other. In addition, Covid has changed the world and everyday life, measles has not.
The judgment deserves attention in other respects. He makes it clear to parents that the almost unlimited self-determination of their own bodies must come to an end when it comes to the health of their own children. While within the scope of their autonomy they are likely to be infected with all viruses that nature has in store, when it comes to health care for the offspring they are committed to the well-being of the child – one that can also and especially in medical questions be determined according to objective criteria. It is not possible to combine both, the fixed ideas of the parents and the health fate of the children. Or, as the court put it: mothers and fathers are “less free to go against standards of medical reasonableness”.
Less free is not something people like to hear in urban milieus, where children’s lives are deprived of the “standard” of mass society, because some parents firmly believe that these are the root cause of disease and epidemics. A kind of parallel reason has developed here, which is probably partly responsible for the fact that the Federal Republic is still where it is in the fight against measles, and which reached pandemic proportions in the dispute over corona policy. She is the problem, because of which the Federal Constitutional Court had to make something a guiding principle that is actually a matter of course: that children only belong to themselves.
