It’s also a problem for state and county public health officials, who have no way to gauge whether the authority is being abused by individual doctors, and for state medical regulators, who have little ability to ferret out abusers. The Medical Board of California, as Pan told me, “generally acts on the basis of complaints from patients.” In these cases, however, “the patient’s family is in cahoots with the medical provider” — vaccine resisters aren’t likely to file complaints against the doctors who gave them what they wanted. If the board wished to discipline a doctor for issuing bogus exemptions, it would have to go to court to obtain patient records, a lengthy, costly and uncertain process.

Source: Los Angeles Times October 30, 2018 13:30 UTC