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Well-known Northland doctor Lance O’Sullivan has renewed a call for benefit cuts and higher taxes for parents who don’t vaccinate their children.
New Zealand is in the midst of a huge surge in measles cases, with almost 900 in Auckland, and more than 1100 confirmed cases notified across the country.
Just 53 of the people who caught measles this year had been vaccinated.
O’Sullivan blames Andrew Wakefield – a struck-off doctor responsible for the fraudulent study that claimed the MMR vaccine caused autism – for the 300 per cent increase in cases of measles across the globe in the past 12 months.
“Now what I say to anti-vaxxers is, ‘Go live on an island'” says O’Sullivan.
Last week he reiterated his call for New Zealand to adopt Australia’s “no jab, no pay” strategy and introduce a higher tax rate for those who do not vaccinate their children.
But the Government says there’s no evidence to show sanctions or compulsion around vaccinations is effective.
In a statement to Stuff, the Associate Health Minister Julie Anne Genter said there was a broad political agreement that children should not be punished for parents’ choices.
O’Sullivan has been a long-time advocate for vaccination.
In 2017 he stormed a screening of the anti-vaccination movie Vaxxed, telling the audience they were responsible for children dying.
He has called for all parents to be forced to vaccinate as far back as 2015 when Australia first brought in the no jab, no pay policy.
The Ministry of Health’s director-general Ashley Bloomfield last week said much of New Zealand’s shortfall in vaccination rates were related to vaccine hesitancy and access issues rather than being directly due to anti-vaxxer sentiment.
However, the University of Auckland’s vaccinologist Helen Petousis-Harris said vaccine hesitancy was a direct result of anti-vaxxers activities.
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