The claim to champion the health of children has been a consistent rhetorical winner for politicians promoting more government spending and control. From the expansion of Medicaid to its present status as a middle-class entitlement to the growth of school-based health clinics, massive new government programs that do little to improve health-care outcomes have all been created in the name of “the children.” And now the latest program coming out of Washington moves us one step closer to nationalized medicine under the pretense of aiding children.

Efforts are underway to establish a national database to collect and monitor child vaccination records and ensure that all children and adults comply with government vaccine recommendations. The National Immunization Program (NIP), a program of the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, will set up a “nationwide network of state and community-based [computer] registries” to include personal and medical records of all children from birth.

The goal, according to President Clinton, is “to make sure that every child is now safe from every vaccine-preventable disease.” The result will be to move us a giant step closer to making our entire health-care system another government bureaucracy. But do we really have a “crisis” concerning the immunization of children?

According to the CDC, “more than 90 percent of our two-year-olds have actually received the critical doses of routinely recommended vaccines,” and more than 97 percent of children are fully immunized by the time they enter school, since vaccinations are virtually free in every state and county health clinic across the nation. Plus, most states have already established their own immunization registries for preschool children. This is hardly a health crisis that requires another government program. Nor are the other 10 percent unvaccinated because of parental neglect.

Christian Scientists, for example, have religious objections to invasive medical procedures. Others are concerned—and for good reason—about the risks associated with vaccinations. According to Pennsylvania Parents for Vaccine Awareness, “as of Dec. 1996, nearly a billion dollars have been paid to parents of vaccine damaged or killed children by the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, via the U.S. Government.”

While vaccinations have prevented the spread of certain diseases, improved sanitation and hygienic practices in the past century are largely responsible for the sharp decrease of childhood illness. According to the Virginia-based National Vaccination Information Center, vaccinations can be credited with, at best, only a small percentage of the reduction in disease related deaths for children. Giving vaccinations all the credit for the decline in childhood diseases is like crediting highway speed limits for the decline in accident-related deaths, without taking into consideration improvements in automobile design and added safety features.

Promoters of this new registry claim that its central purpose is to collect children’s immunization records and contact parents of children who need immunizations. While many parents might welcome such reminders, historical and recent experiences with registries and language in the NIP itself suggest that such a registry would lead to harassment, expanded data collection for non-medical purposes, and staggering costs. Worst of all, it will be a giant step towards nationalizing our entire health-care system.

The NIP’s aggressive outreach activities, dubbed “Reminder/Recall methods,” will harass and punish parents and health care providers who do not yield to government requirements. These activities would include mailings, phone calls, and home visits that could lead to on-the-spot vaccinations. One can only imagine what will happen to those who don’t comply, and parents should not be so naive to assume that the database will include only vaccinations.

Most state immunization registries already include data not related to health care. Similarly, the NIP’s goals are to “gather wide-ranging information” and “to identify and target interventions in every pocket of need.” The recommended core data set for immunization registry entries includes the following personal information: Social Security number, race, primary language, birth order, birth registration number, Medicaid number, and parents’ names and Social Security numbers. Even if strong privacy protections could be put in place, the confidentiality of such information is difficult to protect. Recently, teenage hackers successfully penetrated Department of Defense computers.

An immunization registry will impose heavy burdens on taxpayers and health-care providers. It cost a staggering $417 million just to set up the system and billions more taxpayers dollars will have to be allocated to complete and administer the program.

Despite its goal of higher immunization rates and rhetoric of protecting children, the National Immunization Program is simply the latest attempt to make our entire health-care industry a branch of the state. Such a program would allow federal bureaucrats to invade our children’s privacy and violate their rights. It’s time we reminded these bureaucrats that the ultimate responsibility for a child lies with its parents, not the government.

A. J. Gokcek, a law student at the University of Arkansas, wrote this piece as a summer research fellow at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco, Ca.