Fear of vaccines goes viral, especially among the affluent

Amanda Uhry, who runs a consultancy called Manhattan Private School Advisors, which, as its name suggests, helps parents through the private-school application process, said she recently turned down a half-dozen clients when she discovered that they were opposed to vaccination. For a long while she had never inquired about the issue, but a few years ago, a child she was working with missed his kindergarten interview because of whooping cough, which left her stunned.

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“I thought, Whooping cough? Who gets whooping cough anymore?” she said. The episode compelled her to start asking about vaccination early on. “No application to any school asks, ‘Are you an anti-vaxxer?’ but these schools want to keep the anti-vaxxers out.” So, she said, “I ask people and if they get into the whole anti-vaxxer deal, I say, ‘Fine, we can’t work with you.’ ” You’re not, as she put it, “going to Horace Mann like this.”

There is enough appeal in anti-vaccination thinking among members of the affluent class that certain pediatricians in the city, as they have elsewhere around the country, have made it a policy in recent years to refuse to see children whose parents won’t have them immunized. A few years ago Pediatric Associates of NYC, which has branches in Murray Hill in Manhattan and Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, chose this course, David Horwitz, a partner in the practice told me, in large part because it simply became untenable to have unvaccinated children sitting in waiting rooms.

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