BARCELONA, Spain (AP) – A judge in northwest Spain rejected a family’s objections and decided to allow health officials to administer a coronavirus vaccine to a disabled woman in a nursing home.
The case appears to be the first known court in Europe to require someone to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. The Spanish government has repeatedly emphasized that the shots would be voluntary, as have authorities in other European countries.
In a decision seen by the Associated Press on Wednesday, the judge of the autonomous community court in northwestern Galicia recently ruled in favor of a request from a nursing home to overturn the refusal of the elderly resident’s family and continue to give give him the vaccine.
The resident was considered by the medical staff of the nursing home as having suffered a cognitive loss as she “was unable to provide valid consent”, according to the decision.
Judge Javier Fraga Mandián said the court has a legal obligation to intervene to protect women’s health. He said his decision was not based on the welfare of other residents, but that the “existence of tens of thousands of deaths” by the virus in Spain provided what he saw as irrefutable evidence that not getting the vaccine was more risky. than any possible side effects.
The company that manages the nursing home, DomusVi, told the AP, through its public relations agency, that of all the houses it manages in Spain, this was the only case of a family that did not want to vaccinate a resident who had been considered incapable of personal health decisions.
DomusVi said that 98% of the 15,000 residents in their nursing homes in the country agreed to receive the vaccine. He said the remaining 2% refused to be vaccinated, but, unlike women, they are considered able to make their own health decisions.
DomusVi stated that it intends the court to intervene in the interests of the health of all workers and residents of nursing homes and workers in the Galician establishment.
Spain has administered more than 581,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine since it was authorized by the European Union in late December. Spain is also expected to launch its first batches of the Moderna vaccine.
Health Minister Salvador Illa said on Thursday that Spain was seeing “a very low, almost anecdotal rejection of the vaccine”.
Nursing homes in Spain and across Europe have been devastated by the coronavirus, which spreads rapidly among the elderly and individuals weakened by pre-existing medical conditions. It is estimated that more than 25,000 people with COVID-19 have died in Spanish nursing homes since the pandemic began.
Other lawsuits over the non-voluntary administration of vaccines may be on the horizon.
In southern Spain, a state prosecutor recently said that any family member who acts as legal guardian of disabled asylum residents can lose their guardianship if they refuse to give permission for their relatives to be vaccinated.
The Italian government approved the decree last week to explicitly authorize heads of hospitals and individual doctors to express vaccination consent on behalf of patients who cannot do it on their own, including residents of disabled nursing homes and without a guardian to give your consent.
The procedure requires doctors to submit written documentation to a judge, who has 48 hours to approve or reject the request.
Although almost a dozen European countries have mandatory vaccination laws for diseases such as polio, measles and diphtheria. Laws are rarely enforced by the courts, although a Belgian court in 2008 fined and sentenced two pairs of parents to five months in prison for not vaccinating their children against polio.
Unlike COVID-19 vaccines, which are still technically considered experimental, vaccines required by law in Europe are well-known vaccines and have been used for decades.
The World Health Organization said earlier that it does not recommend making vaccination against coronavirus mandatory, fearing that it could undermine public confidence in available vaccines.
At a news conference last month, Dr. Kate O’Brien, who heads the WHO vaccine department, said it would be better if countries created “a positive environment” for immunization rather than mandates. But O’Brien acknowledged that it may make sense in some high-risk environments, such as hospitals, to require staff members and patients to receive vaccines.
Some ethics experts said the court’s decision to require the woman’s vaccination was probably justified by her high risk of contracting COVID-19, since she lives in a nursing home for the elderly.
“The court must assess the balance of probabilities and, if the woman is elderly, she has a much greater risk of dying from COVID than from a low probability adverse event,” said Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Center for Ethics in Practice at Oxford University.
He said that even in countries that do not have mandatory vaccination laws, the state is obliged to protect people when those who make decisions on their behalf may not be acting in their best interest.
“If you don’t vaccinate this woman and she dies of COVID, people will say, ‘Why didn’t you protect her?’” Said Savulescu.
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Maria Cheng reported from Toronto. Nicole Winfield of Rome and Aritz Parra of Madrid contributed to this story.
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