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History of
Mandatory Vaccination State public health
laws in the U.S. can be traced back to the 18th and 19th centuries
when unpredictable epidemics of highly contagious, dangerous diseases
such as yellow fever, typhoid fever and smallpox would sweep through
crowded, unsanitary port cities after diseased immigrants would
disembark from boats and infect the community. Eventually volunteer
citizen committees formed to quarantine the boats entering the harbors
for weeks until those disembarking were certified "disease-free." The Supreme Court rejected the evidence Jacobsen presented to show that the smallpox vaccination can cause injury and death and that doctors cannot distinguish between those who will be harmed and those who won't be harmed by the vaccination. The Court concluded "The matured opinions of medical men everywhere, and the experience of mankind, as all must know, negate the suggestion that it is not possible in any case to determine whether vaccination is safe." The fact that the nine Supreme Court justices at the turn of the century did not have accurate medical information upon which to base their precedent-setting decision is as understandable as it is unfortunate. It has been proven in the succeeding 94 years, most recently in the U.S. Claims Court in Washington, D.C., where more than 1 billion dollars has been awarded to some 1,000 American families whose children have died or been injured from the adverse effects of childhood vaccines, that often doctors cannot predict ahead of time which children will react to vaccines and die or be left with mental retardation, medication-resistant seizure disorders, learning disabilities, chronic arthritis, paralysis or other immune deficiencies and brain damage. Between 12,000 and 14,000 reports of hospitalizations, injuries and deaths following vaccination are made to the government's Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) every year, yet it is estimated that fewer than one percent of all doctors report serious health problems which occur following drug or vaccine administration. The fact that genetic and other as yet unidentified biological factors can place some individuals at higher risk for vaccine-induced injury and death calls into question the constitutionality of a one-size-fits-all forced vaccination policy that does not take into account individual biological differences. This is a critical point in measuring the consequences of assigning police powers to public health officials for the purpose of enforcing vaccination, particularly in cases where parents suspect their children are at increased risk for reacting to vaccines even though health officials, anxious to achieve a 100 percent vaccination rate, disagree. In their opinion, the 1905 Supreme Court justices acknowledged that vaccination must not be forced on a person whose physical condition would make vaccination "cruel and inhuman to the last degree. We are not to be understood as holding that the statute was intended to be applied in such a case or, if it was so intended, that the judiciary would not be competent to interfere and protect the health and life of the individual concerned." Therefore, when interpreting Jacobsen v. Massachusetts in 1999 it is important to remember that, although the Court stated that states may enact "such reasonable regulations established directly by legislative enactment as will protect the public health and the public safety," the Court also made it clear that mandatory vaccination laws must not be applied unreasonably so as to result in harm to individuals. When public health officials in 1999 make the argument for government-forced vaccination, they often omit mention of this signal by the US Supreme Court that the state does not have the right to command that an individual sacrifice his or her life in the name of the public health. What, then, did the 1905 Supreme Court mean when it went on to declare that "it was the duty of constituted authorities primarily to keep in view the welfare, comfort and safety of the many, and not permit the interests of the many to be subordinated to the wishes or convenience of the few"? The "wishes or convenience" of the few certainly does not translate into the "lives" of the few, but, nevertheless, the historical context in which this declaration was made is extremely important. Utilitarianism
and Sacrifice of Individuals Not long after, Hitler would embrace the same kind of rationalization used by Holmes in that stunning 1927 legal opinion and go on to pursue his own brand of social engineering to eliminate from society those individuals deemed by the Third Reich to be genetically defective or inferior. At the Doctor's Trial at Nuremberg after World War II, physicians employed by the German state forwarded a utilitarian defense to justify euthanasia of the mentally and physically handicapped and the conducting of medical experiments on individuals without their informed consent. They maintained that the sacrifice of some individuals would improve or save the lives of many. It was at the Nuremberg Trial in 1947 that the full measure of the tragic moral failure of utilitarianism was finally revealed. The Public
Health Empire Operating as an independent executive authority with funding from, but little oversight by, the legislative branches of government, this public health empire created by government health officials has seen its most dramatic growth in the last 25 years. Its power over and reach into the life of every American now threatens our privacy, our liberty and the biological integrity of our children and grandchildren. Nowhere is this threat more evident than in the creation of a national, government operated vaccine tracking registry system that will tag all American citizens with a national ID number at birth and track their movements throughout life for the express purpose of enforcing vaccination with all government-endorsed vaccines. It was the desire by government health officials to enforce citizen compliance with mandatory vaccination laws that first created the need for a National ID number and the national electronic medical records database promoted by the Clinton Administration in 1993. An Abuse of
Police Powers As
the use of multiple vaccines to suppress all infectious diseases
increases, so do the rates of chronic illness such as asthma, learning
disabilities, attention deficit disorder, autism, juvenile diabetes,
multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue and other autoimmune and neurological
dysfunctions which have crippled many children and young adults
during the past few decades. The price this and
future generations will pay for unrestricted police powers wielded
by government health officials forcing vaccination in a vacuum of
scientific knowledge is as yet unknown, but landmark reports published
in 1991 and 1994 by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy
of Sciences are revealing. A Political
Agenda The national publicity generated by that action helped to catapult Bumpers to the US Senate in 1974. In 1976, when Jimmy Carter was elected President, it was Dale and Betty who persuaded Jimmy and Rosalyn and HHS Secretary Joe Califano to map out a nationwide campaign to enforce vaccination laws. Bumpers explained, "Betty went over to see Rosalyn and talked to her about it and said 'You know, this is something the President can do so that when he runs for reelection, he can say the government did it.' Because you know, the government was in such disrepute, nobody thought the government could do anything." Bumpers was successful in doubling annual federal appropriations for vaccine programs from $14.5 million to $33 million in 1978 and to $46 million in 1979, and by 1989 vaccine appropriations hit $141 million. On June 14, 1999, President Clinton announced the establishment of the Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center, with $200 million in annual funding. Clinton said "Until an AIDS vaccine is tested and approved, it will remain the primary mission of the Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center…. I look forward to the day when I can come back here...heralding another great vaccine achievement for mankind, the end of AIDS." In 1997, Clinton issued a public challenge to government and industry scientists to put a vaccine for AIDS on the market by 2007. That same year, a member of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the federal committee that sets national vaccine policy, publicly reminded government and industry HIV vaccine developers to test the candidate AIDS vaccines in children because a future AIDS vaccine will be targeted for use in all 12-year-old children. A 1986 Law
To Eliminate Liability In 1986, President Reagan signed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act into law (PL99-660), giving historic societal acknowledgement that vaccines can injure and kill individuals and creating a federal vaccine injury compensation system. Since 1993, federal health officials under Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Donna Shalala have moved to systematically gut the law and fight every claim with the help of Department of Justice lawyers. Today, three out of four vaccine injured children are turned away, and more than $1 billion sits idle in the vaccine injury trust fund created by a small surcharge or "user fee" charged to parents for each state mandated vaccine their children receive. Therefore, since 1986 the vaccine manufacturers and physicians administering vaccines have been absolved of liability for their products and actions with regard to selling and administering mandated vaccines to children. When the FDA licenses a new vaccine, the drug company lobbies federal health officials at the CDC to issue a recommendation for "universal use" of the new vaccine by all children, and after that happens, state health officials add the new vaccine to the list of mandated vaccines. The vaccine manufacturers have a stable, predictable yearly market for their product and no product liability. Robert Wood
Johnson Gets Involved in 1991 That same year, EVERY CHILD BY TWO was co-founded by Betty Bumpers and former First Lady Rosalyn Carter. EVERY CHILD BY TWO is a national campaign to set up mechanisms to vaccinate children with all government-endorsed vaccines by age two and is funded in part by grants from vaccine manufacturers Merck, Lederle, and Connaught. 1991 was also the year that the CDC recommended that all newborns be given hepatitis B vaccine at birth before they leave the newborn nursery, even though only about 21,000 cases of hepatitis B were reported to the CDC in all age groups in 1990 and even though hepatitis B is an adult disease spread through infected blood. Although hepatitis B is primarily confined to adult high risk groups such as IV drug users and persons with multiple sexual partners, by 1999 42 state health departments had added three doses of hepatitis B vaccine to the mandatory vaccination list for all children attending grade school and high school. Between July 1, 1990 and October 31, 1998, there were 24,775 reports of hepatitis B vaccine-related adverse events reports to the government, including 9,673 serious adverse events and 439 deaths. During the same time period, there was a total of 2,424 adverse event reports, with 1,209 serious events and 73 deaths in children under age 14 who got hepatitis B vaccine alone without any other vaccines. This means that one out of two case reports of health problems following hepatitis B vaccination in children ends with a trip to a hospital emergency room, a life-threatening condition, a hospitalization or permanent disability. The Clinton
Administration, The National ID and Electronic Tracking Systems Hillary
Clinton then moved to play a key role
in the Health Care Task Force to restructure US health care with
a plan to tag every citizen with a Unique Health Care Identifier
Number and to record and track everyone's vaccination status and
personal health information from birth to death in a government-operated
electronic database. Ira Magaziner said that President Clinton wants
to "create an integrated system with a card that everyone will
get at birth." A coalition of privacy advocates formed to oppose the vaccine tracking provisions, including the Free Congress Foundation, Eagle Forum, Family Research Council, National Center for Home Education, National Vaccine Information Center, American Civil Liberties Union, Concerned Women for America, Traditional Values Coalition, Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and the American Association of Christian Schools. By the Fall of 1993, strong opposition from the Republicans, privacy advocates and the pharmaceutical industry (which would be forced under the law to sell vaccines to the government at a lower price so children could get free vaccines) forced modifications of the bill. The national vaccine tracking system was eliminated, but language was inserted authorizing $417 million in appropriations to HHS so Shalala could work with state health officials to establish a national network of "state registry systems to monitor the immunization status of all children." The law which passed gave Shalala authority to award federal grants to states to set up vaccine tracking systems and money to reward states between $50 and $100 per fully immunized child, with the dollar figure determined by the total percentage of children fully vaccinated in the state. The National
(and International) Vaccine Plan Takes Shape Shalala Appropriates
Social Security Numbers Teenager Is
Jailed For Failure to Show Proof of Vaccination By 1996, parents were being charged with child medical neglect for failing to vaccinate their children with all government-recommended vaccines. Since 1982, six states have abolished philosophical or personal belief exemption to vaccination, leaving only 15 states with this right. All states still provide for medical exemption (which must be written by an M.D. or D.O.), and all but two allow an exemption for sincerely held religious beliefs. However, in July 1999, CDC officials mounted an assault to counter parent-led informed consent legislative initiatives in Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts and other states in the past few years. An article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association criticizing parents who claim philosophical or religious exemptions to vaccination for their children as a potential disease threat to other unvaccinated persons as well as to vaccinated persons for whom the vaccines have failed to work. Attaching a new label to those who take exemptions to vaccination ("exemptors"), the federal health officials said "Persons who claim philosophical and/or religious exemptions may create some risk to the community because unvaccinated or undervaccinated persons may be a source of transmission…. Exemptors also pose a social equity issue." Addressing the issue of religious exemption to vaccination, CDC officials suggest that more stringent screening standards for proving the quality and sincerity of religious beliefs must be applied when government officials review a religious exemption to vaccination for acceptability. Some states require an unequivocal statement from a religious leader that immunization conflicts with the person's religious belief. This type of requirement for an exemption essentially assesses the strength of conviction of the individual applying for an exemption, similar to Selective Service boards assessing exemptions from the military draft. Other states grant exemption based on a form signed by parents, indicating that immunizations are against the individual's personal belief. In these states, efforts may not be made to assess strength of conviction. They conclude by signaling that government health officials will be taking an even more aggressive and intrusive approach to forcing vaccination in the future, employing "interventions" to persuade exemptors to become vaccinators. Having determined that exemptors are a risk factor for contracting a VPD (Vaccine Preventable Disease), it is important to discover the underlying reasons why individuals are claiming exemptions. Interventions should be developed and implemented to counter misunderstanding of the relative risks and benefits of immunization at both the individual and societal level. The Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (PL 104-191) Shalala Will
Decide Privacy Rights If Congress Does Not Meet Deadline All of these medical "privacy" bills allow extensive exemptions for unrestricted access and use of personal medical information in an individual's medical records by anyone who invokes a right to access and use this information in the name of the public health including government officials, researchers and law enforcement officers. Citizens can be enrolled without their informed consent as research subjects in medical experiments if researchers make the case that the study will contribute to the public health. This means that, without the individual's informed consent, researchers working with government, industry and private physicians will be allowed unrestricted access to personal medical records for the purpose of enrolling unsuspecting patients in medical research experiments. Scientific researchers of the future could experiment on citizens with new drugs and vaccines. The elderly will not know whether the nursing home doctor urging the use of a new antidepressant or the family pediatrician recommending to a mother that her infant get 15 vaccines in one day, is making that recommendation because it is in the best interest of the individual or because the doctor has enrolled his patients in a government-endorsed medical experiment. Conclusion Children are already being denied an education and being turned down for health insurance by HMOs for failing to be vaccinated with all government recommended vaccines. Vaccination status is being linked to government entitlement programs, and there have been suggestions by legislators at both the state and federal levels to make the obtaining of a child tax deduction dependent upon compliance with vaccination laws. Being
tagged and tracked in a government-operated electronic surveillance
database could lead to severe economic and other government-sanctioned
punishments at the hands of health officials assigned police powers
to "protect the public health." Citizens who do not, for
example, comply with government mandates to use an AIDS vaccine
when it is brought to market in the future could effectively be
prevented from functioning in society by being denied an education,
health insurance, a driver's license, employment or even admission
to a hospital, hotel or airplane. If the state can tag, track down and force citizens against their will to be injected with biologicals of unknown toxicity today, then there will be no limit on what individual freedoms the state can take away in the name of the greater good tomorrow. It is time for Americans to call a halt to the immoral use of utilitarianism by government officials to justify and enforce public policy and to reclaim our right to freely and privately choose the kind of health care we want for ourselves and our families. Barbara Loe Fisher is co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, a non-profit educational organization in Vienna, VA founded in 1982. For more information, go to www.NVIC.org or call 703-938-0342. Selected References: |