Ending Censorship, Corruption And Mandated Vaccination

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Born and raised in America, I have always considered myself fortunate, for this great coun­try is “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” But as 2019 draws to a close and I reflect on another year spent working to protect our basic human right to medical informed consent, I find myself questioning the magnitude of our presumed liberties as well as our willingness to go to battle—even when the health of our children is at stake.

As industry, medicine and government grow ever more powerful, our freedoms are diminishing, particularly with regard to vaccine choice. Increased vaccine mandates and censor­ship of views and content supporting vaccine awareness are part of an unprecedented attack on our civil liberties. Aided by historic levels of government corruption and scientific fraud, the squelching of civil liberties is bolstering an unprincipled and out-of-control vaccination program.

Incredibly, many people are not cognizant of the harm befalling their families, nor are they taking to the streets in great enough num­bers to demand protection of their rights. The freedom to raise our children as we see fit is being hijacked. It is time to stand up and take back what we are entitled by the Constitution of the United States of America—starting with bodily integrity.

SICK CHILDREN

As parents, we are our children’s first and best line of defense. We must take action be­cause our children are not well. Today, 54 per­cent of American children live with one or more chronic health conditions,¹ and life expectancy is falling. A recent study found that U.S.-born children are 70 percent more likely to die before they become adults than children born in other wealthy countries.²

Millennials are faring little better. According to a November 2019 report titled “The Economic Consequences of Millennial Health,” prepared for Blue Cross Blue Shield by Moody’s Analytics, “Without intervention, millennials could feasibly see mortality rates climb up by more than 40 percent compared to Gen-Xers at the same age.”³ Despite the fact that the U.S. spends more on health care per person than any other country, its citizens—young and old—are far from the healthiest.

VACCINES AND CHRONIC ILLNESS

In the mid-1980s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) childhood vaccine schedule included twenty-four doses of seven vaccines, and the rate of childhood chronic illness was 12.8 percent.⁴ Today, the CDC recommends seventy-four doses of sixteen different vaccines from gestation to age eigh­teen; children receive the majority within the first six years of life, including the aluminum-containing hepatitis B vaccine at birth.⁵

Admittedly, vaccines are not the sole reason our children are burdened with epidem­ics of chronic illness; however, refusing to acknowledge that the increase in vaccination could be contributing to the spike in ill health is irresponsible. The fact is that rates of many childhood ailments have skyrocketed in con­junction with the addition of more vaccines and doses to the vaccine schedule, including allergies, arthritis, asthma, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), autoimmune diseases, dia­betes, learning disabilities, mental disorders, neurological disorders, obesity and pediatric cancers. Despite these disturbing correlations, health officials worldwide refuse to recognize publicly the harm vaccines can cause. Instead, they uniformly exaggerate vaccination’s benefits while concealing the risks.

In the U.S., the government says little about its Vaccine Injury Table, which sets forth “injuries, disabilities, illnesses, conditions, and deaths” known to be possible following the administration of specific vaccines. The government created the Vaccine Injury Table following passage of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. Designed to serve as a guide for evaluating vaccine injury com­pensation claims, the table’s list of adverse reactions includes, but is not limited to, ana­phylaxis, brachial neuritis, chronic arthritis, death, encephalopathy (swelling of the brain), Guillain-Barré syndrome, intussusception (in­volves obstruction of the intestines), paralytic polio, shoulder injury related to vaccine admin­istration (SIRVA), vaccine-strain measles and vaccine-strain varicella (chickenpox).⁶

PROTECTING INDUSTRY, NOT CHILDREN

Congress passed the act in response to intense pressure from vaccine industry lob­byists seeking protection from million-dollar lawsuits related to the brain-damaging diph­theria, whole-cell pertussis and tetanus (DTP) vaccine.7 The 1986 act and a 1987 amendment recklessly restricted vaccine product liability for manufacturers, pediatricians and others. Since the law’s signing, vaccine industry revenues have increased from one billion dollars per year to forty-four billion annually.⁷ Later the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2011 Bruesewitz v. Wyeth decision eliminated the last vestiges of liabil­ity, blocking the legal right of vaccine-injured persons even to hold drug companies liable for design defects or failure to make approved vaccines safer.⁸

Individuals cannot sue manufacturers in civil court in front of a jury of peers but must petition through the government’s National Vac­cine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP), where a U.S. Court of Claims “Special Master” decides whether to award compensation to those injured by childhood vaccines. There are many barriers to vaccine injury compensation, however, including the three-year statute of limitations on filing a claim, the public’s lack of awareness about the NVICP’s existence and the Vaccine Injury Table’s narrow parameters.

The program denies more claims than it approves—barely a third of petitioners have received compensation.⁹ Even so, the program has paid out over four billion taxpayer dollars to catastrophically vaccine-injured victims and their families. This high dollar figure is all the more remarkable considering that less than an estimated one percent of all vaccine adverse reactions are ever reported to the post-marketing surveillance system known as VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System), which has recorded nearly seven hundred thousand vac­cine reactions, injuries and deaths since 1990.¹⁰

Over the years, Congress has granted broad rule-making authority to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), helping to alter and weaken the original act. For example, HHS can delete (or, in theory, add to) the Vac­cine Injury Table injuries and conditions for which compensation is available. The agency can also change the applicable time periods by which the onset of symptoms must occur in order to qualify as a “table injury.”⁷ According to Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), these actions have seriously compromised the act’s safety and research provisions—which she and other parents fought hard to secure.

To date, HHS officials have not once com­plied with statutory safety review and report­ing requirements. For more than thirty years, neglect and lack of congressional oversight have enabled HHS and the Department of Justice to turn what was supposed to be, according to Fisher, a “non-adversarial, expedited, less expensive, fairer and more predictable federal vaccine injury compensation program. . . into a highly adversarial, lengthy, traumatic and unpredictable imitation of a lawsuit in front of a one-person jury.” Fisher continues, “The reality today is that nobody developing, manufacturing, selling, licensing, recommending, mandating or giving vaccines in the U.S. has real incentive to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths.”¹¹

SILENCING DISSENT

In its Bruesewitz v. Wyeth decision, t he U.S. Supreme Court legally recognized that government-licensed vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe.”⁸ Nonetheless, anyone who dares to question the safety or efficacy of vaccines—or who advocates voluntary rather than manda­tory vaccination—promptly receives the label of “anti-vaxxer,” “unscientific” or “a danger to society.” For questioning or criticizing liability-free, “unavoidably unsafe,” mandated vaccines, people have been fired from their jobs, had their medical licenses revoked, been disbarred (presumably for representing vaccine-injured children and their families) or been jailed. An orchestrated campaign is underway to discredit and silence these individuals, be they parents of vaccine-injured children, enlightened doctors or scientists or simply people who do not believe the government should decide what is medically best for our bodies or the bodies of our children.

Top government employees and lawmakers are among those attempting to quell dissenting voices. Soon after the World Health Organi­zation announced in January 2019 that “the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate” is among the top ten threats to global health,¹² public officials began more attacking those with op­posing views on vaccination. For example, Maral Farsi, deputy director of Legislative and Inter-governmental Affairs at the California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development tweeted: “Warning: #Sacramento #Capitol and #downtown community. The #antivaxxers are back today at 8 am. Take your masks and antibacterial sprays. Stay vigilant with your overly expressive disdain for the oxygen thieves who don’t care about children. #SB276 @DrPanMD@CMAdocs.”¹³

Farsi’s hateful message and others like it disparaged the thousands of citizens who challenged California Senate Bill 276, which decimated medical vaccine exemptions in a state that already had eliminated conscientious or religious belief exemptions for schoolchildren. In the face of fierce opposition from many of his con­stituents, Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law on September 9, 2019. In doing so, he gave absolute power to state health officials to reject medical exemptions granted by doctors.¹⁴ In other words, the state of California—rather than a trusted doctor—is now free to decide what is medically best for your children.

IGNORING CITIZENS

According to Barbara Loe Fisher, most of those protesting SB 276 were concerned parents, many of whom have vaccine-injured or vaccine-vulnerable children. These parents begged the California legislature to allow enlightened doctors with a conscience to continue granting medical exemptions. After officers handcuffed and arrested peaceful, courageous mothers who, in Fisher’s words, “were willing to sacrifice everything to protect their children,” Fisher declared: “When the government must resort to using fear and coercion to demand that parents choose between risking the lives of their children or giving them a school education, the system is broken.”¹⁴

In other parts of the U.S., thousands more citizens demonstrated and testified against proposed bills to remove or restrict vaccine exemptions in 2019. In multiple states, the cries for freedom from concerned citizens fell on deaf ears: Maine eliminated both its conscientious and religious belief exemptions, New York eliminated its religious belief exemption (without a single public hearing) and Washington state eliminated its conscientious belief exemption for the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. If you live in California, Maine, Mississippi, New York or West Virginia, the only remaining vaccine exemption theoretically available for your child is a notoriously difficult to obtain medical exemption (see Figure 1).

FIGURE 1. PHILOSOPHICAL, RELIGIOUS AND MEDICAL VACCINE EXEMPTIONS IN THE UNITED STATES

Source: National Vaccine Information Center. Check nvic.org for updates, as state laws are subject to change.

Not all vaccine mandates apply to children. For years, health care professionals, child care workers, college students, parent volunteers and military personnel have faced requirements for certain vaccines. (Those in the military may now also be required to receive new smallpox and monkeypox vaccines.¹⁵) Many are predicting vaccine mandates for the entire population in the near future. We have already seen HHS efforts to increase adult vaccination, as outlined in the National Adult Immunization Plan¹⁶ and the CDC’s Healthy People 2020 initiative.¹⁷

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE

Industry-funded politicians and others who benefit from vaccine sales worked hard in 2019 to stifle opposing viewpoints and bury scientific studies that contradict the official narrative that all vaccines are “safe and effective” for everyone. Social media platforms, search engines and stores readily removed vaccine-related content running counter to this official narrative.

Overt censorship by lawmakers began when Congressman Adam Schiff wrote a letter to Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, requesting the removal from Amazon of all “anti-vaccine content,” including my documentary, The Greater Good. Schiff also sent letters to the CEOs of Facebook and Google. All three CEOs complied, and Mark Zuckerberg went so far as to pledge that Facebook—the same company recently fined five billion dollars for violating consumers’ privacy rights—would reduce the vis­ibility of those who “spread misinformation about vaccinations.” Other companies (including Etsy, GoFundMe, Instagram, Mailchimp, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and Wikipedia) quickly followed suit.

The deplatforming efforts of search engine companies have had an adverse impact on alternative health organizations. Tactics include delist­ing vaccine-awareness websites (including mine), removing content and modifying search algorithms. According to Sayer Ji, founder and director of the popular website GreenMedInfo, Google has removed many of the top natural health and health freedom websites from its organic search results, causing many websites to lose as much as 99 percent of their traffic. Gravely affected websites include Mercola.com, Kellybroganmd. com, DrAxe.com and Naturalnews.com.¹⁸

Today, if you type the words “organic is a. . .” into your Google search engine, it will autosuggest that you search “organic is a lie,” “organic is a sham,” “organic is a myth,” “organic is a waste of money” and “organic is a marketing gimmick.”¹⁹ As Sayer Ji writes, “Google is autocompleting the search fields of billions of users with false information. . . based not on objective search volume data, but an extremely biased political and socio-economic agenda—one that is jeopardizing the health and human rights of everyone on the planet.”¹⁹

But why would Google want to suppress vaccine-awareness or other health-freedom-related content? The answer is simple: Google profits from growing partnerships with pharma­ceutical companies.18 In 2016, Google signed a contract of over seven hundred million dollars to partner with GlaxoSmithKline, followed in 2019 by a contract with Sanofi Pasteur. Alpha­bet, Google’s parent company, is heavily in­vested with Vaccitech. Each of these companies manufactures and sells vaccines. Google also recently partnered with Ascension (the second largest health care provider in the U.S.) in a collaborative venture called “Project Nightin­gale,” which will transfer personal health data on millions of patients (including data about lab results, medications and diagnoses) to the giant technology company’s cloud-based platforms, the largest trove of such information to date.²⁰ In short, Google is censoring alternative health information for the same reason that the main­stream media will never report on the potential dangers of vaccination—because of lucrative relationships with the medical-pharmaceutical complex. (Note that in 2016, mainstream media and social media outlets received almost ten billion dollars in revenues from pharmaceutical companies.²¹)

Examples of search engines and media outlets omitting vaccine awareness content are abundant. Try to search for an article titled “Government concedes vaccine-autism case in federal court,” which had been online for more than six years, and you will come up short. This is because Huffington Post, which published the article, no longer wants you to be able to read about the case of Hannah Poling, whose family was awarded one and one-half million dollars by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims after it acknowledged that her “regressive en­cephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder” was the result of vaccinations she received at nineteen months of age.²² Though the NVICP has compensated eighty-three cases of vaccine-induced encephalopathy and residual seizure disorder associated with autism,²³ the CDC continues to boldly state on its website that “Vaccines do not cause autism.”

Peer-reviewed, scientific studies are also rapidly disappearing from the Internet or be­ing retracted by prestigious medical journals. Because pharmaceutical companies supply medical journals with income—through adver­tising dollars, subscriptions and bulk purchases of reprints—journal editors are subject to pres­sure and bias. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, wrote in The New York Review of Books that journals “have devolved into information-laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”²⁴ In 2012, drug companies paid for twenty-four billion dollars in advertising tar­geted at physicians.²⁵

When individuals file claims of vaccine injury and death with the NVICP, HHS is the U.S. government defendant. HHS has little in­centive to support research acknowledging that vaccines cause harm because claimants could use those studies against it. This is precisely why, in 2009, high-level HHS official Tom Insel killed a sixteen-million-dollar budget item that was supposed to study the relationship between vaccines and autism.²¹ With one in thirty-six children today diagnosed with ASD, the poten­tial dollar figure for compensating those families would bankrupt the compensation program.²⁶ For this same reason, government lawyers in 2007-2008 unethically denied compensation to five thousand four hundred families who had filed NVICP claims for vaccine-induced autism.⁷ If public health officials were to admit openly that vaccines can cause autism and a host of other illnesses, public faith in vaccine policy would collapse.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

The top four manufacturers of childhood vaccines in the U.S.—Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and Sanofi Pasteur—have been indicted some one hundred thirteen times for criminal conduct. Together, they have paid in excess of thirty-three billion dollars in fines for falsifying data, bribing doctors and lying to the public. Merck, the same company that paid out nine hundred fifty million dollars in federal fines and almost five billion dollars in settled law­suits related to its painkiller Vioxx, has been in federal court since 2010 on fraud charges brought by its own virologists, who allege that the company forced them to falsify efficacy data for the MMR vaccine.⁷

Politicians from both political parties have become dependent on contributions from this unethical industry. In 2019, members of Congress received over nine million dollars in campaign contributions from pharmaceutical companies.²⁷ As a result, elected politicians are reluctant to rock the boat.

But what about the government agencies created to protect public health? Why won’t they inform the public that vaccines can and do cause injury and death? Why won’t they ap­propriately assess vaccine safety? The answer to this piece of the puzzle is also money. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—environmental attor­ney, activist and founder of Children’s Health Defense—has written, “Financial conflicts and self-interest transform key sectors of our public health bureaucracies into appendages of the very pharmaceutical companies that Congress charged them to regulate.”²¹

Kennedy’s quote refers to financial conflicts of interest at agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and CDC—the entities charged with developing, licensing and recommending vaccines. As Kennedy explains, public servants within these agencies are often “shareholders in, grant recipients from and paid consultants to vaccine manufacturers, and, oc­casionally, patent holders of the very vaccines they vote to approve.” Consider the example of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immuniza­tion Practices (ACIP), which formulates vaccine recommendations. Dr. Paul Offit of the Chil­dren’s Hospital of Philadelphia served on the ACIP from 1998 to 2003 while simultaneously working under a grant from Merck to develop a vaccine for rotavirus. During this period, Offit voted three times in favor of decisions related to the use of rotavirus vaccines, and in 2006 the FDA approved the vaccine (RotaTeq) that Offit helped develop. Two years later, he sold his stake in the patent for millions of dollars.²⁸

Offit was not alone in his glaring conflict of interest. In 2000, a congressional report pointed out that “four out of eight CDC advi­sory committee members who voted to approve guidelines for the rotavirus vaccine in June 1998 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.”²⁴ Although the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) states that individuals appointed to ACIP should disclose “all vaccine-related interests and work” at the beginning of each ACIP meeting, the CDC routinely issues waivers for conflicted individuals when it ascer­tains that “the need for the individual’s services outweighs the potential for conflicts of interest created by the financial interests involved.”⁷

INCENTIVES AND FRONT GROUPS

It is not uncommon for public health of­ficials to leave their government jobs to take highly-paid drug company positions. Julie Gerberding, former head of the CDC, became president of Merck’s five-billion-dollar global vaccine division after leaving CDC, reportedly earning two and one-half million dollars per year.²⁴ Gerberding took the position at Merck after having added more vaccines to the CDC childhood schedule than any other person previ­ously in her position; at the time of her depar­ture from CDC, Merck was the manufacturer for fourteen of the seventeen vaccines on the schedule. In May 2015, Gerberding sold Merck stock worth over two million dollars, selling stock worth over five million dollars in Novem­ber 2016.²⁹ Today, Gerberding is executive vice president of strategic communications, global public policy and population health and chief patient officer at Merck.

According to Kennedy, agency budgets and incentives are also a big part of the problem. For example, the FDA receives 45 percent of its annual budget from the pharmaceutical industry, and HHS employees can collect up to one hundred fifty thousand dollars annually for products they work on. Sales of Merck’s controversial human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, Gardasil, yield tens of millions annu­ally in patent royalties for HHS. In addition, Kennedy points out that the CDC is itself a vaccine company—the agency owns over fifty vaccine-related patents and buys and distributes almost five billion dollars in vaccines annually through the Vaccines for Children Program, which constitutes over 40 percent of its budget. The pharmaceutical industry directly funds and controls dozens of CDC programs through the CDC Foundation.²¹

The vaccine industry and the CDC also fund trade groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and vaccine front groups such as the Immunization Action Coalition (IAC) and Every Child By Two (ECBT). Since 2009, the CDC has given the AAP over twenty million dollars—over a third explicitly vaccine-related.³⁰ A 2017 analysis in The BMJ showed that the CDC provides one-third of ECBT’s annual funding.³⁰

FLAWED APPROVAL PROCESS

One of the most egregious examples of pub­lic health agency corruption has to do with how the FDA licenses vaccines. Most members of the public assume that the FDA requires rigorous safety testing, but the agency does not actually oversee scientific research on new vaccines. Instead, it allows manufacturers to do their own testing for safety and efficacy. Moreover, although vaccines are complex chemical com­pounds, the FDA classifies them as “biologics,” not “drugs,” which means that vaccines are not subject to the same clinical trial requirements as drugs. As a result, it is not uncommon for manu­facturers to test a new vaccine against an exist­ing vaccine that contains aluminum—hardly an inert substance—making it possible to mask differences in adverse reactions between the two groups. Unbelievably, no childhood vaccine has ever undergone double-blind testing using an inert saline placebo prior to FDA approval, nor has anyone ever tested the vaccine schedule for its cumulative effects on children’s health.

In 1992, Congress passed the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which allows pharmaceuti­cal companies to make payments to the FDA (called “user fees”) in exchange for expedited approval of drugs and biologics, including vac­cines. By the year 2017, three-fourths of the FDA’s annual budget increase came from user fees.⁷ Additional legislation passed in 2012 allows the FDA to use “sur­rogate endpoints” to evaluate a drug or vaccine rather than waiting to assess longer-term clinical outcomes.

The agency capture facilitated by user fees and the more lax require­ments for biologics allow vaccine manufacturers to speed their products to market with minimal testing and monitoring, and little attention to adverse reactions. For example:

• Clinical trials for Merck’s Recombivax hepatitis B vaccine monitored fewer than one hundred fifty infants and children for only five days after each dose. One has to search the vaccine’s package insert to find out that autoimmune diseases and “an apparent hypersensitivity syndrome. . . of delayed onset [have] been reported days to weeks after vaccination.”³¹
• Merck used a variety of dubious methods to test and fast-track its Gardasil vaccine. Post-licensure studies show that Gardasil and Gardasil 9 (which contains more than twice the amount of neurotoxic aluminum adjuvant as the original Gardasil) have grave risks, including impaired fertility, demyelinating disease, chronic limb pain, circulatory abnormalities and autoimmune illness. Recent data suggest that the HPV vaccines may actually be increasing cervical cancer risk.³²
• The FDA’s initial approval of rotavirus vaccines proceeded despite clinical trial indications of an increased risk of intussus­ception, an often excruciating and potentially fatal condition in which one segment of the intestine “telescopes” inside of another causing intestinal blockage. The rotavirus vaccines currently on the vaccine schedule continue to pose intussusception risks and also have been found to be contaminated with foreign DNA from porcine viruses capable of causing severe immunodeficiency in pigs.⁷

DATA MANIPULATION AND WORSE

The disregard for vaccine safety has been evident for years. In 2000, at a secret meeting at the Simpsonwood Retreat Center in Georgia, the CDC brought together a panel of fifty-one experts to discuss the impact of thimerosal-containing vaccines on nervous system disorders in chil­dren. The lead speaker, Thomas Verstraeten, MD, presented data sup­portive of a causal relationship between thimerosal (mercury) exposure and childhood developmental disorders. Although Verstraeten’s initial analyses found consistently elevated risks (two to eleven times higher) in the high-exposure group compared to the zero-exposure group, all but one attendee agreed to rate the association as “weak.”⁷

Under then-director Gerberding, the CDC went on to publish a series of epidemiological studies quickly thrown together to support the secret meeting’s conclusion. To help construct these spurious studies, the CDC enlisted Danish scientist Poul Thorsen. Today, Thorsen is on the “most wanted fugitives” webpage of the HHS Office of Inspector General for allegedly diverting over one million dollars of CDC grant money to his personal bank account. HHS and the Department of Justice have made no effort to extradite Thorsen from Denmark—where he fled to escape twenty-two counts of wire fraud and money laundering—and senior CDC officials continued to collaborate with him and publish his studies after his flight.³³

In 2013 and 2014, whistleblower Dr. William Thompson, a senior CDC scientist, discussed many issues regarding CDC fraud and malfea­sance in taped phone conversations with Dr. Brian Hooker. According to Thompson, he and other CDC researchers purposely omitted data (again while Gerberding was CDC director) from a 2004 study that examined the MMR vaccine and autism. The study found a 250 percent increase in autism among African-American boys who received the MMR vaccine before their third birthday compared to African-American boys who re­ceived the vaccine after age three—and also showed an increased risk of autism in MMR-vaccinated children who had been developing normally and had no other medical problems. Thompson turned over thousands of pages of CDC documents to Congressman William Posey (R-FL). Although Congressman Posey has consistently urged Congress to take action, to date Congress has not held a single hearing.³⁴

SEEING THROUGH THE LIES

Maybe the greatest falsehood told about vaccines is that they are responsible for the reduction in infectious disease mortality. While it is true that infectious disease-related deaths have declined greatly, nearly 90 percent of the decline happened in the U.S. before 1940, when few antibiotics or vaccines were available (see Figure 2). The decline was largely attributable to an increased standard of living—including improve­ments in socioeconomic conditions, water, sewer systems and hygiene.³⁵

In the decades since the advent of widespread vaccination, many problems with vaccine efficacy also have become apparent. For example, the 2018-2019 flu shot was 29 percent effective at best.³⁶ Diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccines (DTaP and Tdap) also reveal poor efficacy. The vaccines are supposed to protect against the respiratory infection com­monly known as whooping cough, but according to recent studies, pertussis is making a come­back. Pertussis epidemics have increased in the U.S. “in both size and frequency”; from 1990- 2005, over half of all cases occurred in highly vaccinated adolescents aged ten to twenty years old.³⁷ The CDC and FDA have shown little inclination to address these problems; instead, the FDA continues to approve flu shots every year despite their historically dismal efficacy rates, and the CDC continues to recommend mercury-containing influenza vaccines for pregnant women and everyone else six months and above, as well as recommending Tdap shots for pregnant women.

With so many examples of corruption and censorship, why should parents trust public health officials—especially when they may be trading typically benign acute childhood ill­nesses for a lifetime of chronic disease? Parents who choose not to vaccinate are not “misin­formed”—on the contrary, they are aware of the science showing that vaccines are neither unilaterally safe nor of guaranteed effectiveness. They also recognize that current vaccine policy and a one-size-fits-all schedule pose threats not just to our health but our liberty.

Dissenting parents recognize the harmful impact of injecting their children with unsafe substances, including aluminum, antibiotics, cells from aborted fetuses, foreign DNA and proteins, formaldehyde, mercury, monoso­dium glutamate (MSG) and polysorbate 80. They understand that entities like the FDA and CDC—the very agencies meant to protect fami­lies—have made a mockery of pre-licensing safety testing and post-marketing surveillance while regularly manipulating (or destroying) data in order to exaggerate vaccine safety and effectiveness. Enlightened parents are also aware that vaccine manufacturers have used their money and power to subordinate health agencies, medical front groups, medical jour­nals, politicians and the media.⁷

The American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics asserts that all persons have the right to choose whether or not to accept a risky medical procedure, yet states continue to mandate vaccines in a growing number of educational and work settings. In some states, minors as young as twelve can agree to vac­cines for sexually transmitted diseases without parental consent. Vaccine policy has become the means for shoring up a lucrative business model. In this model, the government approves and mandates vaccines, funds programs to ensure vaccine compliance, uses a surveillance system designed to under-count vaccine injuries by 99 percent, provides blanket immunity to manufac­turers and defends itself against compensation for victims of vaccine injury and death.

Now is the time to end vaccine mandates, address the many conflicts of interest and repeal the disastrous act that gave vaccine manufac­turers their unprecedented liability-free status. The bottom line is that the decision of whether to vaccinate fully or partially or abstain alto­gether should be the decision of truly informed individuals, not the government.

It is vital to protect informed consent rights and vaccine choice. The best way to do so is to educate and empower legislators and residents in your state to defend vaccine freedom. In 2019, almost half of the vaccine-related bills filed in state legislatures (fifty-eight out of one hundred twenty-two) had components intended to strengthen rights related to vaccine exemp­tions and informed consent. This happened only because people took the time to meet with and educate their elected representatives. Together, we can reverse the tide. After all, legislators and the pharmaceutical industry would fall flat without our votes and dollars. For the sake of our children, it is time to end vaccine mandates, censorship and corruption.

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SIDEBARS

MEASLES AS A TROJAN HORSE FOR MANDATES

In 2019, reported measles outbreaks in New York spurred an unprecedented vaccine mandate for the general population. On April 9, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a state of emergency and ordered every unvaccinated person six months or older living in four specific zip codes in Brooklyn to obtain a measles vaccine within forty-eight hours or face a possible one-thousand-dollar fine.³⁸ This directive penalized Orthodox Jewish residents in particular who sometimes choose not to vaccinate their children.

No deaths ensued from the twelve hundred or so cases of measles reported in thirty-one U.S. states in 2019, about 75 percent of which were linked to New York.³⁹ On the other hand, since 1990, VAERS has received reports of more than eighty-nine thousand MMR vaccine reactions—including four hundred and forty-five MMR-related deaths.40 Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has pointed out that many of the MMR vaccine’s symptoms “might persuade rational consumers to choose the infections over the vaccine”; in Merck’s pre-licensure studies, ⁴⁰ 40 percent of vaccine recipients suffered gastrointestinal illnesses within forty-two days and 55 percent suffered respiratory illnesses—and the package inserts list over sixty adverse reactions, including permanent brain damage.⁴¹ (For an in-depth account of the 2018-2019 measles outbreaks, see my article titled: “Measles: a close examination of the facts to counter the fear” in the Spring 2019 issue of Wise Traditions.⁴⁰)

KILL THE MESSENGER

Researchers, scientists and doctors who present data that raise questions about official vaccine policy are often subject to attacks on their credibility and careers. The case of Dr. Andrew Wakefield is perhaps the most famous. Once a well-respected gastroenterologist practicing at the United Kingdom’s Royal Free Hospital, Wakefield and fellow doctor and researcher Dr. John Walker-Smith were brought up on charges of scientific misconduct by the UK’s General Medical Council (GMC) merely for expressing concerns regarding the safety of the MMR vaccine in a 1998 scientific paper titled: “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children.”

Wakefield, Walker-Smith and coauthors published the case study—describing twelve previously healthy children who developed severe gastrointestinal disorders—in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. The paper noted that for eight of the twelve children, parents and personal physicians reported the onset of symptoms of autism nearly im­mediately following MMR vaccination. (The thirteen physicians involved in the published study had investigated over forty other similar cases.) The authors did not claim that the MMR vaccine was responsible for the gastrointestinal health problems but did recommend further research into the potential association—a recommendation that was unpalatable to public health officials and vaccine policymakers. The Lancet went on to retract the article, despite replication of its findings in multiple studies, and in May 2010, the GMC revoked Wakefield’s and Walker-Smith’s medical licenses. Dr. Walker-Smith subsequently regained his license, but Dr. Wakefield continues as a frequent target and scapegoat of both the press and medical community.

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REFERENCES

1. Too many sick children. Children’s Health Defense. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/too-many-sick-children/.
2. Kiff S. American kids are 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than kids in other rich countries. Vox, Jan. 8, 2018.
3. Blue Cross Blue Shield. The Economic Consequences of Millennial Health. Nov. 6, 2019. https://www.bcbs.com/the-health-of-america/reports/how-millennials-current-and-future-health-could-affect-our-economy.
4. Gushée SR. Are we more sick than ever? Thrive Global, Dec. 30, 2016. https://medium.com/thrive-global/are-we-more-sick-than-ever-55dc696be7dc.
5. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolescent.html.
6. Vaccine Injury Table. https://www.hrsa.gov/sites/default/files/vaccinecompensation/vaccineinjurytable.pdf.
7. Children’s Health Defense. Conf licts of Interest Undermine Children’s Health. April 2019. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/ebook-sign-up-conflicts-of-interest/.
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This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Winter 2019

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