TORONTO — The city of Toronto has suspended 248 members of its public health service — including public health workers, veterinarians and other employees — without pay for at least a month for failing to show proof of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccination.
The cases of non-coverage of the vaccination “resulted in an elevated risk to the community” because of the high number of so-called first-time non-coverage, said Toronto’s chief medical officer, Dr. Hélène Di Salvo.
City Health Officer Dr. David McKeown stressed that it was not that the vaccination wasn’t available; rather, the city’s billing and collection efforts for the vaccine were so successful that many citizens had no idea they were protected.
“The reason people are missing is quite simply that they didn’t know they were supposed to get it,” McKeown said, in an interview Wednesday. “And what we found was some public health workers, in particular, they were recommended to make sure that they had all the provincial regulations in terms of receiving and completing the mandatory immunization and so they went back and reviewed the records and of course the records weren’t complete.”
McKeown also criticized the Toronto District School Board for not requiring documentation for the vaccination when individual schools reported individual students. And the City of Toronto’s billing department also broke the law by using an honor system for administering the vaccine.
“We were forced to make clear that you really had to do the work yourself,” McKeown said. “When you’re collecting revenue, you are very regularly breaking the law because you can’t say, ‘Oh, we’re not going to enforce the law against you.’ So we’re going to have to hire people to actually, in fact, do that.”
McKeown said the city is considering a new billing process and guidelines for how vaccines should be administered in the city.
Toronto’s Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. David McKeown. (Anne-Marie Otterbein/The Globe and Mail)
The vaccinations are required for all city residents who work or have personal contact with patients of public health facilities, including children in their care.
To address this “adverse effect,” the health authority recommended all other non-coverage cases be tracked by boroughs that contract the organization through a “vaccine tracking program.”
The majority of the suspensions, 175, have been completed as of Wednesday, city officials said.
McKeown emphasized that there is no reason for the public to be concerned about their own health.
The decision not to vaccinate a child on their own needs to be discussed with the child’s parents, but McKeown warned that the vaccinations can increase the risk of a child to contact a measles, mumps and rubella virus and to contract the disease if they are not vaccinated.
“If parents choose not to vaccinate their children, we have to protect everybody,” McKeown said. “So that means all the other children are also protected.”
Di Salvo said, “This should have never happened. This is an absolute preventable outbreak. We had a vaccine in place. We should have seen it.”
Medical experts say the vaccines are “97 percent effective” against measles, mumps and rubella, making them “extremely important” in protecting the health of others.
For their part, the group of employees is confident that they should be allowed to return to work on “duly completed forms and never did know” about the vaccine mandate, McKeown said.
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