The immunization of children in family break-down: Questionable evidence and conceptual shortcomings in <i>A.P. v L.K.</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canadian case of A.P. v L.K. began as a garden-variety family arbitration, which turned on the arbitrator’s articulation and application of the ‘best interests of the child’, but is relevant to responsible practice at the nexus of family and medical law, and is significant to the practice of arbitration – specifically the certification of expert medical witnesses – and to the realization of individual (child) and public health. This case involved an ‘expert’ witness whose evidence contributed to an award directing that the children of the marriage need not be vaccinated. In addition to relying on an inappropriately woolly and narrow conception of ‘best interests of the child’ (a matter of concern to both family and health lawyers), the arbitrator provided a legitimizing platform for, and accepted the questionable evidence of, a politically motivated expert (a matter of concern to lawyers interested in natural justice and the integrity of adjudicative processes). The case is, therefore, a stark example of how (public) health can be undermined and family law warped to a political end, and it, therefore, deserves our close attention, not least for its seemingly unexamined acceptance of unfounded claims and pseudo-science. After briefly reciting the various demands in the case, this article outlines the disposition of the case, and then examines in detail the handling of the vaccination dispute, which, it is argued, was unsupported and unreasonable, offering suggestions about how to avoid similar outcomes in the future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.038 | 0.058 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.070 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.027 | 0.029 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".