Taking Away Vaccine Exemptions

"Permitting personal belief exemptions and easily granting exemptions are associated with higher and increasing nonmedical US exemption rates. State policies granting personal belief exemptions and states that easily grant exemptions are associated with increased pertussis incidence. States should examine their exemption policies to ensure control of pertussis and other vaccine-preventable diseases. " - JAMA, October 11, 2006

"Concerns about vaccine safety seem to be the main reason parents claim such exemptions, Salmon told Reuters Health. In an earlier study, he and his colleagues found that 69 percent of parents who sought exemptions did so because they feared vaccination did more harm than the diseases it prevents. Salmon and his colleagues argue that states should have "administrative controls" that make non-medical exemptions more difficult to obtain. This, Salmon said, could look something like the process of becoming a conscientious objector to the draft. Parents would apply for an exemption and have to show a "strongly held belief" against vaccines, he explained. Then the government would either have to demonstrate an "overwhelming need" for universal vaccination or grant the exemption. " - Amy Norton, Reuter's Health

"Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National VaccineInformation Center in Virginia, said exemptions allow people to make choicesabout health care for themselves and their children. In some cases, risks are real and science has not caught up with vaccine policy, she said. "The priciple of informed consent is, you’re able to make a voluntary decision. It applies to every other medical intervention," Fisher said." - Misti Crane, Columbus Dispatch

Barbara Loe Fisher Commentary:
Are more American citizens standing up for their right to make voluntary, informed decisions about vaccination which do not conform to one-size-fits-all forced vaccination policies endorsed by CDC officials and the utilitarians at Johns Hopkins? Apparently they are and it is making the government and industry funded M.D./Ph.D./MPH employees at the CDC, Johns Hopkins and other academic institutions determined to take away all exemptions to vaccination except those they and their colleagues personally grant to citizens.

In the past 25 years as the CDC has increased the numbers of vaccines recommended for "universal use" by all children from 23 doses of 7 vaccines to 48 doses of 14 vaccines by age six, more and more children have been getting sick and regressing physically, mentally and emotionally after vaccination. In the past two decades, there has been a tripling of the numbers of highly vaccinated children who are now chronically ill and disabled and suffering with learning disabilities, ADHD, asthma, diabetes, and autism. America's children are in the middle of a chronic disease and disability epidemic and the only solution government health officials and professors of public health offer is to suggest ways to force more vaccines on sick children.

The most common reason that parents exercise a philosophical or conscientious belief exemption to vaccination for a child is because the child or a close relative has a history of vaccine reactions and health deterioration after previous vaccinations. Unfortunately, in the past two decades, government health officials have so severely restricted the medical criteria for contraindications to vaccination that few individuals qualify. Doctors who write medical exemptions which do not fit the strict federal government criteria, are often second-guessed and harrrased by state government health officials. Because medical exemptions to vaccination have become virtually non-existent, the only exemptions available to parents acting to protect their children from vaccine injury and death is the religious and philosphical exemption.

What is becoming more evident to more parents is that unvaccinated or partially vaccinated children move through illness and heal more quickly and are getting better grades in school because they do not have difficulty concentrating or learning like their more sickly, lower functioning highly vaccinated classmates. Empirical evidence and personal experience always trumps methodologically flawed scientific studies and the words and actions of government health officials employing strong-arm tactics to force their ideology on others.

The tragedy of forced vaccination policies is that the immoral utilitarian rationale is used to justify human rights abuses while distorting the truth about what constitutes good individual and public health. If everybody is forced to get vaccinated, then there can be no comparison of the long term health of those highly vaccinated to those who receive fewer or no vaccines. Public health officials inside and outside of government, along with their colleagues in the pharmaceutical industry, have a lot of prestige, power and money to lose if the health differences between the highly vaccinated and unvaccinated ever become widely known. That is one reason why they are pushing so hard to elminate all exemptions to one-size-fits-all mandatory vaccination laws.