Anti-vaxxers are on the ascendant. And they are lowering our collective resistance to deadly outbreaks.

Now, Toronto’s Board of Health wants to raise our political will to resist, before the problem goes viral — not merely socially in the online world but medically in the real world.

In Toronto, a parent can simply declare a religious or philosophical objection to these supposedly compulsory vaccines, after which they are well on their way to a government-approved exemption for their children. To secure the waiver, they need only attend a vaccination education session, which is about as persuasive for an anti-vaxxer as a David Suzuki documentary for a climate denier.

As hard as our health professionals try to coax people into compliance, it is fast becoming a losing battle as anti-vaccine propaganda and scaremongering foster ignorance and fear. Studies show that as many as one in five residents of Greater Toronto are hesitant to receive vaccinations for themselves or their children.

Given the discouraging trend lines — a doubling of exemptions over a decade — the city’s medical officer of health has sounded the alarm in a persuasive report about vaccine “hesitancy.” This week, the board of health endorsed her appeal to ask the provincial government to stop issuing voluntary waivers without a valid medical reason certified by a practitioner.

But at Queen’s Park, Health Minister Christine Elliott is showing no signs of heeding that call. Despite her public acknowledgment earlier this year that an anti-vaccine ad campaign was “very concerning,” a spokesperson now says the provincial government has no plans to change the current approach that relies on persuasion over coercion.

Like her Liberal predecessors, Elliott seems reluctant to recognize the threat to public health from those who steadfastly claim an individual right to refuse. We cannot forcibly inject people, but we can do our best to banish unvaccinated children from public spaces for the public good, in hopes that their parents will either reconsider or, by retreating to their homes, reduce the risk of spreading disease.

While that unfairly stigmatizes the banned student, and makes a political martyr of their parents, it spares other innocents the deadlier risk of personal martyrdom. For the problem with opting out of vaccinations is not just that it exposes the recalcitrant individual to disease, it potentially makes them a carrier who spreads infection.

While other students in the classroom may already be vaccinated, and thus protected, there will always be some who are unable — for legitimate medical reasons — to be inoculated. They are the ones most at risk, and most unfairly.

We often talk of the perils of a herd mentality, but it is so-called “herd immunity” that is truly protective in this case. Scientists describe it as the tipping point that is achieved when a sufficiently high proportion of society is vaccinated to reduce the odds of a few outliers being infected — those who for various reasons (such as medical necessity, infancy or pregnancy) are unvaccinated and therefore vulnerable.

Paradoxically, anti-vaxxers (and their children) may well be healthy and resilient enough to recover from any infection; as carriers, however, they are exposing others who may be far more susceptible to illness and complications.

But allowing unvaccinated children in the classroom isn’t the only unnecessary medical risk that troubles scientists. Ontario has encouraged and underwritten free flu vaccines every year, yet they continue to face resistance — not only from diehard anti-vaxxers but stubborn health professionals who insist on second-guessing the best expert advice.

To be sure, the annual flu shot currently lacks the targeted precision of other more established inoculations, because it is based on the best estimates of what elements from previous flu seasons will be most effective in guarding against future infections. Despite that variability, it is still the best defence we have in hospital and other settings where vulnerable seniors can be exposed to the flu bug carried by health-care workers.

Nurses’ unions and other labour groups have fought hard against any attempt to make it mandatory, and fiercely resisted hospital requirements that workers without vaccinations wear a face mask. It is unfortunate that those who have voluntarily chosen the healing professions would impose their own individual decisions on the patients they serve — when they are at their most vulnerable.

It has been a decade since Toronto’s medical officer of health asked the provincial government to make the flu vaccine mandatory for front line workers. An estimated 8,000 people die of influenza across Canada every year, many of them seniors who might be spared that fate if we could reach the threshold of herd immunity in society.

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Vulnerable people enter hospitals to protect their health, not imperil it. We send children to school to expose them to learning, not endanger them through ignorance.

There are times when the collective good requires clear policies, based on scientific data, that override individual discretion. Protecting the most vulnerable from those who go unvaccinated — and insist on going with their gut — is one of those times.