A 1962 Decree Still Bars an Unvaccinated Child From Sitting an Exam in a Portuguese School, and This Week the State Deleted the Page That Said So

Somewhere in the Portuguese state this week, a small argument was settled by deleting a web page. Since April, the government's services portal had told parents that a child up to the age of 10 needed up-to-date diphtheria and tetanus vaccinations to enrol in a school, and to sit an examination in one. After Portuguese television reported the wording, it vanished. Neither the health ministry, the education ministry nor the prime minister's office explained why it went up, or why it came down.

The awkward part is that the page was quoting a real law. Decreto-Lei n.º 44198, de 20 de fevereiro de 1962 has never been amended in 64 years, and article 4 of it is explicit: no individual may attend or sit an examination at any teaching establishment, or be admitted to public office, without proving by medical certificate or by attestation from the health authority that they are duly vaccinated against tetanus.

A Statute Nobody Repealed

The decree made anti-diphtheria and anti-tetanus vaccination compulsory for everyone domiciled in the country, starting between three and six months of age, with boosters between 18 and 24 months and between five and seven years. Its preamble is a period piece, reporting that deaths from both diseases remained higher than desired and that free vaccination campaigns had not produced the take-up expected, so compulsion was worth trying.

The state then spent the 1960s quietly failing to enforce it. Article 7 gave everyone a year to get the first shot, and that year was extended three times, ending with Portaria n.º 21401 of 15 July 1965, which pushed the deadline out to 30 June 1966. Decreto-Lei n.º 46621 of 27 October 1965 created the boletim individual de saúde (individual health record) and gave its vaccination entries probative value, which is why that booklet is still the document a Portuguese school asks to see. All of this is catalogued in a technical note prepared for the Assembleia da República (Assembly of the Republic) in January 2017, when a Public Health Bill went to committee and parliament's researchers listed which vaccination laws remained formally in force. The 1962 decree was one of them.

What the State Says Instead

Asked about it this week, the education ministry said vaccination information is not requested on the Portal das Matrículas, the national enrolment platform, and is therefore not an impediment to enrolling, though a school may ask for it afterwards. The Direção-Geral da Saúde (Directorate-General of Health) said that not being vaccinated does not obstruct a child's registration, enrolment or attendance at school, while recommending that families follow the Programa Nacional de Vacinação (National Vaccination Programme).

Both statements describe practice accurately. Neither describes the statute. Portugal runs a voluntary vaccination programme, free at the point of use, with childhood coverage above 95 percent and nine confirmed measles cases this year, almost all imported. It has achieved that without once using the 1962 power, and public health doctors describe the decree as obsolete.

What This Means for You

• Your child cannot be refused enrolment: the DGS and the education ministry both say so, and vaccination is not a field on the Portal das Matrículas.
• Bring the record anyway: a school may ask after enrolment. If you arrived from abroad, take your child's foreign vaccination record to a health centre and ask for a Portuguese boletim individual de saúde, which is the format schools recognise. Our guide to school enrolment covers the rest of the paperwork.
• A school citing the rule is not inventing it: the 1962 text is on the books. It is simply not applied, and no ministry has said this week that it should be.

The cleanest fix would be to repeal a decree the state has no intention of using, or to say plainly that it stands. Deleting the sentence that described it does neither.