Most medical consent laws require parental permission for minors to get a vaccine. Now some places are easing restrictions for Covid shots while other

As Parents Forbid Covid Shots, Defiant Teenagers Seek Ways to Get Them

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2021-07-19 07:00:08

Most medical consent laws require parental permission for minors to get a vaccine. Now some places are easing restrictions for Covid shots while others are proposing new ones.

But the secret that Elizabeth, 17, a rising high-school senior, keeps from hers is new to the buffet of adolescent misdeeds. She doesn’t want her parents to know that she is vaccinated against Covid-19.

Her divorced parents have equal say over her health care. Although her mother strongly favors the vaccine, her father angrily opposes it and has threatened to sue her mother if Elizabeth gets the shot. Elizabeth is keeping her secret not only from her father, but also her mother, so her mom can have plausible deniability.

The vaccination of children is crucial to achieving broad immunity to the coronavirus and returning to normal school and work routines. But though Covid vaccines have been authorized for children as young as 12, many parents, worried about side effects and frightened by the newness of the shots, have held off from permitting their children to get them.

A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that only three in 10 parents of children between the ages of 12 through 17 intended to allow them to be vaccinated immediately. Many say they will wait for long-term safety data or the prod of a school mandate. But with many teenagers eager to get shots that they see as unlocking freedoms denied during the pandemic, tensions are crackling in homes in which parents are holding to a hard no.