By Nicole Precel and Henrietta Cook
Anti-vaccine activists are using online guides to teach families how to circumvent “no jab, no play” laws and keep their unvaccinated children enrolled in Victorian childcare centres.
Step-by-step guides on social media on how to exploit loopholes and the potential falsifying of immunisation records have experts worried that families flouting the system pose a risk to the health of other children.
A doctor injecting a young child with a vaccinationCredit: iStockphoto
The No Jab No Play legislation was enforced in 2016 to boost rates of immunisation against potentially serious or deadly childhood illnesses such as whooping cough, rubella, chickenpox and mumps.
The federal government can withhold childcare subsidy from the family of an unvaccinated child. Victoria has gone further and banned children from enrolling in childcare centres if they are not inoculated, unless they have a medical exemption, a healthcare card or meet specific criteria.
But Australian vaccine refusers, forming online communities of up to 15,000, have been devising and sharing techniques to dupe childcare providers.
Tips are being swapped online on how to exploit loopholes in the law, such as grace periods for parents to vaccinate their child, which were designed to ensure disadvantaged families don’t miss out on childcare. Social media posts also discuss how to falsify immunisation certificates using Photoshop.
“They can’t do anything, you remain enrolled,” one mother wrote on a Facebook group.
Katie Attwell, vaccine policy expert at the University of Western Australia, said the pandemic had encouraged some people to circumvent vaccination rules.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if COVID has empowered, enabled and inspired people,” she said.
“We don’t have any data on how many people do this because they don’t want to be caught and don’t want to be seen.”
As misinformation about vaccines continues to circulate online, including the discredited but persistent belief that vaccines cause autism, Attwell said it could be worth revisiting the No Jab No Play legislation, as long as changes didn’t hurt disadvantaged groups.
She said prosecuting parents using fake immunisation certificates might have a deterrent effect on others considering gaming the system.
Anti-vax parents are finding ways to avoid immunising their children, some going as far as trying to falsify documents.
According to the Australian Immunisation Register, vaccination rates have declined since the pandemic. As of September 2024, the national coverage rates were 92.4 per cent for one-year-olds (down from 94.3 per cent in 2019), 90.7 per cent for two-year-olds (down from 91.6 per cent in 2019) and 93.8 per cent for five-year-olds (from 94.89 per cent in 2019). There has been a consistent drop over the past four years.
Victoria has higher rates than the national average. Full immunisation coverage in the state sits at 93.01 per cent and 91.42 per cent for one-year-olds and two-year-olds respectively.
Attwell said the no jab, no play policy helped create herd immunity in the broader community and on a smaller scale, made childcare centres safe.
“That’s really important for people like mums going through chemotherapy, newborn babies that come along to pick-up,” she said. “So there’s all these people that really need those places to be safe.
“Does it matter that people are basically able to dodge that lever and both enter a childcare centre and therefore make that space potentially unsafe, but also contribute to lowering of immunisation rates in our community? It’s really a question of scale.”
An outbreak of a notifiable disease at a childcare centre would invite scrutiny of the no jab, no play regime, Attwell said.
“I think people would be asking, ‘How the hell did this happen?’ It may only be a matter of time until that does happen.”
Murdoch Children’s Research Institute vaccine expert Dr Jess Kaufman said access and affordability were factors in declining vaccination rates, but also pointed to a decline in trust in healthcare authorities, leaving parents prone to misinformation.
Kaufman said vaccine-sceptic families were also gravitating towards small-time, off-the-books family daycare centres.
“They’re not accredited, and they have a collection of kids who ... don’t want to vaccinate,” she said.
“Those are certainly vulnerable communities because it’s all unvaccinated kids altogether, and those have been described in research about really firm vaccine refusers.
“You’re supposed to have 95 per cent coverage to really contain a measles outbreak from spreading. So anything less than that, it could potentially take root.
“If you’re talking about specific communities that are already at 87 per cent, and then you decline further, that’s a real risk.”
One mother, who provides step-by-step guides to help parents enrol their unvaccinated children into childcare centres, said the current legislation was “pointless” and “unlawful”.
“Are there any other medical procedures it is acceptable to be coerced into?” she said, adding that her unvaccinated daughter was enrolled at a kinder.
“What kind of parent would do something to their child they perceive as harmful? We will always find other ways instead of vaccinating.”
University of Sydney social scientist Professor Julie Leask said there was a small group of parents who always found ways of working around vaccine requirements.
But she said locking out the children of vaccine refusers had always been a step too far.
“[I]t’s a small group whose contribution to the overall risk is quite limited,” Leask said.
“There are better ways to get high vaccination rates and protect families than taking these children out of preschool education.”
She said childcare centres needed more support to enforce vaccine requirements, now they are in place.
“A centre might forget, and then they don’t follow up, or they might not want to have that difficult conversation when the child is settled in,” Laesk said. “That may be where that very small group of parents tries to take that opportunity to keep their kids in childcare.”
A Health Department spokeswoman said Victoria had some of the highest rates of childhood vaccination in Australia, but that families needed to keep children up to date with vaccinations to protect them from serious infections.
“The no jab, no play policy is in place to help keep children safe from vaccine-preventable diseases like measles, whooping cough, chicken pox and meningococcal,” she said.
The spokeswoman would not comment on the loopholes being exploited by vaccine refusers.
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