CDC Wants to Expand Power to Eliminate Measles What You Need To Know and Do Now

Published 9/13/2016

By Barbara Loe Fisher

To activate and view hyperlinked references, please click here once and then click any superscripted number below to access a hyperlinked reference, or scroll down to the bottom of the article to view all hyperlinked references.


I remember the day in 2007, when I was standing in front of a Maryland country courthouse videotaping interviews with mothers and fathers lined up with children, who had been thrown out of school for failing to show proof they had gotten chickenpox and hepatitis B shots. ¹² State public health officials were threatening the parents with fines and jail time and suddenly, as we were talking, men in uniforms with guns and dogs emerged from the courthouse and headed toward us. In the pit of my stomach was the sickening feeling that people in countries throughout history have felt when the exercise of freedom of thought, speech and conscience is met with a demonstration of police power wielded by agents of the State.

Today, the American people are challenged, as they have never been before, to confront the expansion of government authority over our bodies and the bodies of our children, specifically the exercise of police power to take us into custody and isolate us without our consent whenever public health officials believe we are sick or could become sick. At stake is the preservation of human rights and cultural values that have been part of America since the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights defined civil liberties two centuries ago.

Related Police Powers Resources

• Model State Health Powers Act
• The National Electronic Tracking Registry
• Isolation and Quarantine in the US (CDC)
• Public Health Laws on Quarantine and Detention
• Selected NVIC Commentaries
• Selected NVIC Statements on Tracking & Privacy
• Government Policing Efforts in the Media
• NVIC Briefing Paper- Homeland Security and Vaccine Injury Compensation
• Drug Companies Get Liability Protection In Homeland Security Bill

Are public health officials getting ready to apprehend and quarantine you or your child if they believe you are, or could become, infected with measles or any other communicable disease they decide is a threat to the public health?

Are they enlisting airline and other public transportation personnel to help them conduct a dragnet that will be easy for you to get caught up in when you travel?

Once you are detained, can they hold you for 72 hours against your will until you agree to be vaccinated or they declare you are no longer a threat?

Is this for real or not?  You be the judge.

CDC Moves to Amend Public Health Service Act

During the last days of summer, while we were vacationing, shopping for school supplies or, in the case of Virginia families, while we were busy pleading with legislators to protect the medical and religious vaccine exemptions in state vaccine law, ³⁴ public health officials at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) were quietly publishing a very long Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in the August 15, 2016 Federal Register to amend federal public health law. ⁵  The part of the Public Health Service Act they want to strengthen is the part that gives them power under the US Constitution ⁶⁷ to restrict the freedom of a person entering the U.S. or traveling between states if they believe the person is infected or could become infected with certain kinds of communicable diseases. ⁸

You only have until Oct. 14, 2016 to make a public comment to the CDC and contact your legislators in Congress, so please take this seriously because what the CDC is proposing applies to all Americans who travel outside the country or between states, especially on commercial airlines. In the future, it could extend to any form of transportation when you cross state lines, including by bus, train or car.

Involves States With Police Powers

This Notice of Proposed Rule Making – or NPRM - involves the participation of federally funded state health departments and state facilities, too, because the majority of police power to detain, isolate and quarantine citizens belongs to the states. ⁹¹⁰ Many state legislatures, which have legal authority to pass laws controlling communicable diseases within state borders, voted to give public health officials expanded police powers after Sept. 11, 2001 by adopting the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (MSEHPA) ¹¹¹²¹³ and The Turning Point Model State Public Health Act ¹⁴ created at Georgetown University’s Center for Law and the Public’s Health and the CDC Collaborating Center Promoting Health through Law.

If this NPRM is implemented and the states follow suit, you and your children could be vulnerable to detention and quarantine if health officials decide you are, or could become, a transmitter of measles or other infections because, for example, your electronic medical records reveal you have not gotten every dose of every CDC recommended vaccine. Let’s not forget that no government agency, corporation or person, who creates, produces, sells, licenses, recommends, mandates or administers a federally recommended vaccine to you or your child, has accountability or liability in a court of law in front of a jury of your peers if you become brain injured or die from vaccination.¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷

The Quarantine List Was Short But Not Anymore

In a nutshell, the federal government is consolidating and strengthening power that was originally used to prevent persons with yellow fever and cholera from disembarking from ships entering US ports in the 19^th century and causing epidemics on land.¹⁸ For most of our country’s history, the list of contagious diseases that allowed government health officials to detain and quarantine people without their informed consent was appropriately very short, confined to a few very serious contagious diseases, including yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, and the plague.

It is worth noting that polio was never put on that list.

In the past 15 years, CDC officials persuaded two Presidents to issue Executive Orders in 2003, 2005 and 2014 to expand the “isolate and quarantine” list. In 2003, Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers, such as Ebola, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS were added. ¹⁹ In 2005, pandemic influenza was added. ²⁰ But in 2014, the Presidential Executive Order did not name a specific disease that would warrant detention and quarantine, it simply described “diseases associated with fever and signs and symptoms of pneumonia or other respiratory illness” that have “the potential to cause a pandemic” or are “highly likely to cause mortality or serious morbidity if not properly controlled.” ²¹

Now, the word, “morbidity,” means the incidence or how often a disease occurs in a population, ²² and is very different from mortality, which means death. There are many viral and bacterial infections that occur quite often in our country, like bronchitis and the stomach flu. Almost every infection has the potential to cause serious complications, injury or death for some people, but that doesn’t mean government health officials should have the power to take you into custody and isolate you if you look sick or have been around someone who is sick.

Displaying symptoms of respiratory illness is wide-open territory, and those symptoms can be due to everything from severe allergies, asthma and COPD to sinus infections, pertussis, measles, chickenpox, and pneumonia.  Other symptoms that could get you detained under the NPRM are vomiting and diarrhea or a fever over 100 degrees, which are common to everything from allergic reactions, inflammatory bowel disease, salmonella and norovirus infections to hangovers and the common cold. How about a headache with stiff neck that could be nothing more than a bad migraine?

CDC Puts Measles in Same Basket with Ebola

So people took notice when the CDC announced on Aug. 15 that there was an urgent need to amend federal public health law to “reduce and mitigate the risk of outbreaks of Ebola, MERS, measles and other communicable diseases in the U.S.”
Ebola and…..MEASLES?

Let’s see, Ebola is a lethal, highly contagious virus that can quickly overwhelm and damage the human immune system and cause uncontrollable bleeding from the eyes, nose, mouth and every orifice, killing 25 to 90 percent of people who get it. ²³²⁴ And then there is measles, which I remember having as a child for a week while I took naps, wore sunglasses and read books with my Mom, ate chicken noodle soup and sipped fruit juice until the spots went away. That was my experience with measles in the 1950’s and it was the commonplace experience of 99.99 percent of baby boomers in America, who got measles or chickenpox.

In 1960, three years before the measles vaccine was licensed, the death rate for that childhood infection was 0.2 cases per 100,000 persons.²⁵ Before the chickenpox vaccine was licensed in 1995, there were about 100 deaths per year in a U.S. population of 260 million people. ²⁶ A case of measles or chickenpox does not come close to qualifying as a public health emergency that requires a person to being taken into custody by a government official.

Have a Rash? You Could Be Detained

And, yet, the CDC is arguing that, “The ongoing persistence of measles in the United States provides a good example of the need for this NPRM,”²⁷ and “Although not a quarantinable communicable disease, every case of measles in the United States is considered a public health emergency because of its extremely high transmissablity.”²⁸

So in the NPRM, the CDC defines a potentially “ill” person deserving of special government scrutiny to be someone with “areas of the skin with multiple red bumps, red, flat spots or blister like bumps filled with fluid or pus that are intact or partially crusted over,” warning ominously that “the presence of skin rash, along with fever, may indicate that the traveler has measles, rubella (German measles), varicella (chickenpox) meningococcal disease or smallpox.” ²⁹

Smallpox? As in the infectious disease that the smallpox vaccine is supposed to have eradicated from the earth? Or is the CDC talking about weaponized smallpox, as in the weapons of mass destruction that have never been found and prompted the U.S. Congress to create a lucrative public-private partnership with the pharmaceutical industry after Sept. 11, 2001 to create lots of new liability free vaccines under the umbrella of “bioterrorism?” ³⁰³¹

OK, let’s accept that there is an extremely small possibility that the traveler could be infected with weaponized smallpox, but let’s also admit that it is far more likely that the traveler with a skin rash is suffering from a bad sunburn, acne, rosacea, eczema, psoriasis, the hives, or severe allergies and that a mild fever could be due to an old fashioned cold. The specter of babies with eczema, teenagers with acne and families who spent too much time in the sun being pulled off airplanes and detained in CDC quarantine centers³² at airports around the country is comical, if it were not such an obvious warning that Americans are in clear and present danger from federal government overreach.

CDC officials appear to be obsessed with measles in the NPRM. They point out that, “different diseases may elicit different levels of responses at the public health department level, with a more rapid response for highly infectious diseases like measles that can be prevented with timely post-exposure prophylaxis, and a more measured response for less infectious diseases like TB.” ³³ The term “post-exposure prophylaxis” means they want to inject you with MMR vaccine.

Tuberculosis has been on the “isolation and quarantine” list for decades. Now the CDC is implying that measles is more dangerous than tuberculosis. Come to think of it, the NPRM looks like it was written with Merck - the sole source supplier of MMR vaccine in the U.S. - at the drawing table.

CDC Wants Airline Personnel to Report If You Are Sick

In the NPRM, the CDC uses their familiar refrain, “communicable diseases are just a flight away,” and this is a heads up that your airport experience is about to become an even bigger nightmare than it already is if their plan becomes law. Frequent flyers, you should know that the CDC wants to, in effect, deputize commercial airline personnel to step up surveillance on passengers, who have rashes, diarrhea, vomiting, low grade fevers, coughing or otherwise “appear obviously unwell” and report them to health officials.³⁴ I wonder how much money it is going to cost the airlines to train their personnel to be infection control nurses and snitch on passengers who “appear unwell” like coughing too much or going to the bathroom too often?

And if you are suspected of being sick or likely to get sick with an infection that health officials consider serious enough to qualify for detention, here is what will happen:

After You Are Taken Into Custody

After you are taken into government custody, it appears you can be held for 72 hours without the right to contact an attorney or anyone else to appeal your detention. You will be asked to sign a contract with the CDC that you consent to the “public health measures” being applied to you or your minor child, which may include “quarantine, isolation, conditional release, medical examination, hospitalization, vaccination, and treatment.”³⁵

But even if you don’t voluntarily agree to sign that contract, public health officials can still do whatever they want to do to you because “the individual’s consent shall not be considered a prerequisite to any exercise of any authority” by the CDC.³⁶ And if government officials do release you from detention, you can be electronically tracked and monitored, including by electronic tracking devices you have to wear or by email, cell phone texts, video conferencing and voicemail. ³⁷

It will be easy for the CDC to electronically track and monitor your movements after they release you. Since the early 1990’s, when Congress passed the phony HIPPA “privacy” legislation, federal health officials have been using your tax dollars to create and operate electronic medical records and vaccine tracking systems that use health care identifiers to keep tabs on how healthy or sick you are, what kind of drugs you take, and which vaccines you have gotten. ³⁸³⁹⁴⁰ HMOs are hooked in ⁴¹ so your medical information, including your vaccination status, can be shared with gernment researchers, pharmaceutical companies and law enforcement officials.  ⁴²

You Can Be Fined and Jailed for Disobeying CDC Orders

And if the CDC finds you guilty of disobeying their orders and they believe you transmitted an infection to someone else, you can be fined “$100,000 if the violation does not result in a death, or one year in jail, or both, or a fine of no more than $250,000 if the violation results in a death, or one year in jail or both.” ⁴³ Plus they have added this curious language without explanation: “Violations by organizations are subject to a fine of no more than $200,000 per event if the violation does not result in a death, or $500,000 per event it the violation results in a death.”⁴⁴

Right now, measles is not officially on the “detain and quarantine list.” But measles easily could be put on that “isolate and quarantine” list if CDC officials convince the President to issue an Executive Order if or when the NPRM becomes law after Oct. 14, 2016.

Eradicating Measles From the World

It is no mystery why the CDC gave measles a lot of attention in the NPRM. Measles is the next infection that the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control want to “eradicate” through global forced vaccination programs like they did with smallpox and polio.⁴⁵⁴⁶ In underdeveloped countries, armed police with dogs join forces with doctors with syringes and hunt down every last citizen to get them vaccinated ⁴⁷⁴⁸⁴⁹ with, in this case, it would be an MMR shot or two, or three…or more.

Reportedly, the global measles eradication campaign ⁵⁰ will kick into high gear after public health officials soon make the announcement that polio has been eradicated from the earth. ⁵¹ That declaration will be made, even though vaccine strain polio paralysis is crippling children, who have been given live oral polio vaccine over and over and over again in mass vaccination “pulse” campaigns. ^52535455

The Long Arm of the Public Health Police

It looks like federal health officials are upping the ante in the high stakes chess game that industry, government and medical trade have been playing with the freedom of the American people for a long time. The long arm of the public health police is being felt already in states like Mississippi, West Virginia and California, which have eliminated vaccine exemptions, and forced vaccination lobbyists in dozens of other states are attacking exemptions protecting freedom of thought, conscience and religious belief. ⁵⁶⁵⁷ Pediatricians are being encouraged to become belligerent enforcers of vaccination and deny medical care to children, whose parents refuse to give them every one of the 69 doses of 16 vaccines CDC officials recommend. ^{58  5960} And nobody can forget the manufactured public health crisis in 2015, when a few cases of measles at Disneyland turned into a media feeding frenzy, with calls for doctors to be stripped of their medical licenses for criticizing vaccine safety and providing care to unvaccinated children, and for censorship of freedom of speech about vaccination, and for parents of unvaccinated children to be charged with medical child abuse, sued, fined and jailed.⁶¹

Sound familiar?

Most Americans support laws that prevent people infected with a highly contagious lethal virus like Ebola from entering or traveling in the country. That is why there was a justifiable public uproar in the summer of 2014, when public health officials failed to exercise the Constitutional authority they have always had to prevent persons infected with or exposed to Ebola from entering or traveling in the U.S.⁶²
But measles is not Ebola and chickenpox is not smallpox.

Millions of Americans Want Vaccine Freedom of Choice

Public surveys show that 87 percent of parents have declined one or more federally recommended vaccines for their children ⁶³ and one-third of all U.S. adults ⁶⁴ and 42 percent of Americans under age 30 ⁶⁵ don’t think parents should be forced to vaccinate their children. That is a lot of Americans wanting to exercise freedom of thought, speech and conscience when it comes to vaccination. But even supporters of mandatory vaccination laws need to pause and reflect upon a federal government plan to take into custody and quarantine people who have a rash or cough a lot.

Just read the hundreds of public comments already posted on the CDC’s website by outraged citizens. ⁶⁶ After you do that, please post your own comment, too, before Oct. 14 and contact your members of Congress, ⁶⁷ who may not be aware of what the CDC is trying to do. Signing an online petition or “liking” an article on Facebook is not enough. You need to make direct contact by phone, email or in person with the people who represent you in Congress and express your sincere concerns.

The CDC’s proposed change to the Public Health Service Act is not about health. It is about taking away civil liberties that keep Americans safe from tyranny. It is about getting permission to tag, track and force individuals against their will to be injected with biologicals of known and unknown toxicity today, so there will be no limit on which individual freedoms the State can take away in the name of the greater good tomorrow.

The question is: Will be American people let them get away with it?

Will you let them get away with it?

Or will you stand with the growing citizen army of enlightened Americans who are defending the human right to freedom of thought, speech, conscience, religion and informed consent in this great country of ours. You know what needs to be done. Stand up and protect your civil liberties now, so you will never have to wish you had when you still had the freedom to do it.

Before it is too late, browse our site and go to NVICAdvocacy.org to learn how to become a vaccine freedom advocate in your state.

It’s your health. Your family. Your choice.

References

Defending the Religious Exemption to Vaccination

Posted: 6/28/2016

 By Barbara Loe Fisher

To activate and view hyperlinked references, please click here once and then click any superscripted number below to access a hyperlinked reference, or scroll down to the bottom of the article to view all hyperlinked references.

Every summer, Americans celebrate the 4^th of July to mark the day in 1776 when the American colonies agreed they would no longer be ruled by an aristocracy. The Declaration of Independence begins with, “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” That Declaration was a rejection of oppression by a ruling aristocracy and the pledge that this country would uphold the unalienable natural right to life and liberty that belongs to every person.
240 years later, we find ourselves again fighting for freedom from oppression because we have allowed the rise of a new ruling aristocracy, an elitist class of privileged citizens who want the legal right to judge, shame, segregate, discriminate against and punish fellow citizens who do not share their beliefs.  Nowhere is this truth more self evident than in the oppressive implementation of one-size-fits-all mandatory vaccination laws that fail to respect biodiversity or human rights and crush citizen opposition, in violation of the informed consent ethic and freedom of thought, speech, conscience and religious belief. ^{1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25}
When a ruling aristocracy uses the heel of the boot of the State to create fear and oppress average citizens for their beliefs, there is no other word for it but tyranny. The appropriation of unaccountable authority by medical trade and the militarization of public health in the 21^st century should be of concern to every person who values life and liberty. ^{26 27 28 29}

U.S. Supreme Court: Vaccines are “Unavoidably Unsafe”

In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with what Congress said in 1986, and that is:  government licensed vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe” and pharmaceutical corporations should not be liable for vaccine injuries and deaths. ^30 31 Today, when your child dies or is permanently brain injured after vaccination or the vaccine fails to protect your child, you cannot hold the vaccine manufacturer or the doctor who gave the vaccine accountable in court in front of a jury of your peers.
With this free pass, in 2011 and 2012 the multi-billion dollar vaccine machine powered by medical trade, industry and government rolled into the legislatures of Washington, Vermont and other states with the goal of eliminating religious and conscience vaccine exemptions that have been in place in the U.S. for more than half a century. ³²  NVIC has worked with families and other grassroots organizations to protect vaccine exemptions in 15 states but, in 2015, Vermont lost the conscience exemption and California lost the personal belief exemption protecting both exercise of conscience and religious beliefs. ³³

Vaccine Machine Invades Virginia

This year, the vaccine machine invaded Virginia.  A proposed law was introduced in the House of Delegates in January 2016 to strip away not just the religious vaccine exemption, but also the medical exemption for all children, whether they are being homeschooled or are enrolled in public or private schools. ³⁴ An individual physician would no longer exercise professional judgment when granting a child a medical exemption but would become a government agent enforcing the narrow one-size-fits all federal vaccine contraindication guidelines ^35 36 approved by the Centers for Disease Control, which means that 99.99 percent of children would not qualify for the medical vaccine exemption in Virginia. ³⁷
Virginia families pushed back quickly and hard against the draconian bill that would make Virginia the state with the most oppressive forced vaccination law in the country. ³⁸  Although the bill was temporarily withdrawn this year by the attorney lobbyist and obstetrician sponsoring it, ³⁹ similar legislation is expected to be reintroduced in 2017 after a report is released by the Joint Commission on Healthcare this fall.
Virginia has a very tiny 1.1 percent vaccine exemption rate for kindergarten children, which is lower than the national vaccine exemption rate of 1.7 percent. In fact, Virginia ranks in the top 10 states with the lowest vaccine exemption rates. According to the CDC, only 305 kindergarten children in Virginia have a medical vaccine exemption and 891 children have a religious vaccine exemption. ⁴⁰
So why has the vaccine machine attacked a state with one of the lowest vaccine exemption rates in the country to persecute 1200 kindergarten children and their parents?

Freedom of Conscience, Religion First Became Law in Virginia

For the answer, you have to look no further than the history of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the principles upon which the United States of America was founded. Virginia is the hallowed ground where freedom of thought, conscience and religion was first defined as a natural right and was codified into American law. Virginia is the place where George Mason and Thomas Jefferson wrote the Virginia Bill of Rights and the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom and where, over the years, the General Assembly has enacted the strongest religious freedom and parental rights legislation in the country.
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution approved by Congress in 1789 says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
That First Amendment was based on the Virginia Bill of Rights adopted by the Virginia General Assembly before Congress approved the U.S. Constitution Bill of Rights.
Section 16 of the Virginia Constitution states that:

1. “All men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience;” and
2. “No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever,” and
3. “The General Assembly shall not prescribe any religious test whatever” on citizens.

This means it is a violation of the Virginia Constitution to eliminate the legal right to exercise religious beliefs according to the dictates of conscience, or to force citizens to belong to an organized religion or a particular church in order to exercise conscience and religious beliefs.

Virginia’s 1786 Act for Religious Freedom

There is another law in Virginia that protects freedom of religion. Virginia’s Act for Religious Freedom was adopted by the Virginia Assembly in 1786, three years before the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution was approved.
This historic Act is very clear about what religious freedom means, stating in the first sentence that, “Almighty God hath created the mind free.”
Here Virginia law is saying that freedom of thought was given to mankind by God.
The Act goes on to say that, “All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burdens, or by civil incapacitations… are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion...”
Here Virginia law is saying that a human being has a natural right to freedom of thought, conscience and religious belief and must not be coerced or punished for exercising it.
The Act accurately points out that legislators and rulers are “fallible,” that they do not have the right to assume “dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others….”
Here Virginia law is emphasizing that human beings, including government officials, are not infallible and that religious faith is individual, a matter of conscience, and that legislators do not have the right to impose their ideology, opinions and beliefs on others.
Even more strongly, the Act states that, “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”
Here Virginia law is pointing out that individual opinions about math and science differ, just as opinions about religion differ, and an individual’s exercise of religious belief must not limit the individual’s exercise of civil rights.
Finally, in a ringing defense for freedom of thought and religious liberty, the Virginia Religious Freedom Act declares without qualification that, “No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities…..We are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present, or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.”
When Virginia law talks about natural rights, it is referring to what today are often described as human rights. Among the human rights recognized globally is the right to freedom of conscience and religion. Conscience can be defined as the part of your mind or an inner sense that tells you what is right or wrong and guides you to a morally right action.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 after World War II states that, “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”
When explaining religious freedom to his friends and colleagues, Thomas Jefferson said that freedom of religion belonged to, “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.” ⁴¹ Jefferson believed in a Creator but he did not identify with an organized religion nor was a member of a church, and his reference to “Infidel of every denomination” likely was an affirmation of freedom of thought, which also includes the freedom to be agnostic or an atheist and have no religious beliefs.
In other words, freedom of religion encompasses freedom of thought and conscience and applies to all personal beliefs about religion.
Additionally, the ethical principle of informed consent to medical risk taking has been defined as a human right since 1947. ^42 43 44 Today, informed consent is globally recognized as central to the ethical practice of medicine. ⁴⁵ Informed consent means you have the right to be fully informed about the benefits and risks of a medical intervention, such as use of a pharmaceutical product like vaccines, and be free to make a voluntary decision without being coerced or punished by anyone for the decision you make.
Your human right to exercise informed consent to medical risk taking without being coerced or punished for the decision you make is very similar to the language in the Virginia Religious Freedom Act that protects citizens from being punished by government officials for exercising the natural right to freedom of conscience and religious belief.

Virginia Reaffirms Religious Freedom Act in 2007

In 2007, the Virginia Assembly reaffirmed the Religious Freedom Act of 1786 with a major caveat and that is, “No government entity shall substantially burden a person’s free exercise of religion… unless it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person is (1) essential to further a compelling governmental interest and (2) the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”
This caveat sets an appropriately high bar for substantially restricting a person’s free exercise of religious belief. For example, if the state argues it has a compelling governmental interest to prevent an infectious disease epidemic, government officials must still demonstrate that mandatory vaccination laws are “essential” to achieve that goal, and then, further demonstrate that those laws are being implemented in “the least restrictive” way.

Vaccine Freedom of Choice: A Human Right

When we defend the natural right to exercise freedom of thought, conscience and religious belief, we are not called upon to talk about different scientific hypotheses explaining how and why vaccines can cause injury and death, or why the CDC is unaccountable and a whistleblower should be subpoenaed by Congress to testify about the risks of a particular vaccine. The arguments about vaccine science and who is right and who is wrong about it will be argued for the next century.
Our responsibility is to defend without compromise the human right to exercise freedom of thought, conscience and religious belief for ourselves and our minor children for whom we are legally responsible, without being discriminated against and punished with denial of education, health care, employment or other societal sanctions that violate our civil rights.
There are three general statements about vaccination in the U.S. that cannot be disputed, which are:

1. Like prescription drugs, vaccines are pharmaceutical products that carry a risk of injury, death and failure. ^{46 47 48 49}

2. There are genetic, biological and environmental high risk factors that make some individuals more susceptible to vaccine reactions, but doctors cannot predict who will be harmed. ⁵⁰

3. The U.S. Congress and Supreme Court have declared government licensed and mandated vaccines to be “unavoidably unsafe” and more than $3 billion dollars in federal vaccine injury compensation has been awarded to children and adults under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. ⁵¹

These three basic facts about vaccination affect your human right to exercise freedom of thought, conscience and religious belief:
Because vaccines can injure or kill and doctors cannot predict who will be harmed, and the U.S. government has acknowledged that fact and indemnified pharmaceutical corporations and doctors, while awarding financial compensation to children and adults who have been injured or died from government licensed vaccines, ⁵² you have the human right to exercise informed consent, freedom of conscience and religious belief when making a decision about vaccination for yourself or your minor child.

Judeo-Christian Tradition Affirming Duty to Follow Conscience

The medical practice of vaccination is only 220 years old and came thousands of years after the founding of the world’s major organized religions (Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism). There is no major religion with a written tenet opposing vaccination.
However, there is a strong Judeo-Christian tradition affirming the duty of those who believe in God to follow their conscience.  If you are a Christian, you can find passages in the Bible, which affirm your beliefs as a Christian to follow your conscience and the guidance given to you by God through prayer. Prayer for guidance is central to many Protestant denominations. ⁵³
For example, there is Timothy 1:5 - “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.”
There is Proverbs 3:5 - “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.”
There is Colossians 2:8: “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.”
There are many more Bible verses that affirm the need for Christians to have faith in God and be guided by scripture and follow their conscience.
Also, the definition of moral conscience is discussed in detail in the catechism of the Catholic Church, which holds that, “Conscience is a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing or has already completed. In all he says and does, man is obliged to follow faithfully what he knows to be just and right. It is by the judgment of his conscience that man perceives and recognizes the prescription of the divine law.”
In even stronger terms, the Catholic Church warns that, “a human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience. If he were deliberately to act against it, he would condemn himself.”
If you are of Jewish faith, your foundation is the old testament of the Bible and the Torah, which emphasize that man is created in the image of God and that each individual human being has worth and a right to equal and loving treatment. Preservation of human life and reliance on God is central to the teachings of Judaism.
There is Psalm 146 -  “Halleluyah! Praise HASHEM, O my Soul! I will praise HASHEM while I live, I will make music to my God while I exist. Do not rely on nobles, nor on a human being for he holds no salvation. When his spirit departs he returns to his earth, on that day his plans all perish. Praiseworthy is one whose help is Jacob’s God, whose hope is in HASHEM, his God. He is the Maker of heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, Who safeguards truth forever…”
Whatever your sincere religious beliefs, you do not have to be a member of an organized religion or church to hold them and defend your human right to exercise freedom of conscience. In America, you should not have to live in fear that you will be judged and punished for exercising freedom of thought, conscience and religious belief.

Assault on Cultural Values and Beliefs in America

Mandatory vaccination laws that violate human rights are the tip of the spear of the political assault on cultural values and beliefs in America, including freedom of conscience and religious belief. ⁵⁴ This assault began in the 20^th century with the tragically flawed 1905 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Jacobsen v. Massachusetts ^{55 56} that used the pagan ethic of utilitarianism ^57 58 59 to devalue the life of the individual and endorse state forced vaccination. That morally corrupt legal decision served as the basis for another morally corrupt Supreme Court ruling in Buck v. Bell in 1927, when Virginia doctors were given the green light to sterilize Carrie Buck in an endorsement of state eugenics laws based on the cruel utilitarian “greater good” rationale. ^60 61
The 1905 U.S. Supreme Court justices may have given state health officials the legal authority but they will never possess the moral authority to demand that individuals sacrifice their lives for what the State has defined as the “greater good.” Laws that fail to protect freedom of thought, conscience, religious belief and informed consent are a violation of human rights and the false ethic of utilitarianism should never be used to implement public health policy in America.

Virginians Ready to Defend Human and Civil Rights

The ruling aristocracy operating the vaccine machine has chosen Virginia as the battlefield to wage a war on religious liberty because they know that if freedom of thought, conscience and religion can be gutted in Virginia, it can be gutted anywhere.
The citizens of Virginia who understand what is at stake stand ready to defend human and civil rights on the hallowed ground where freedom of conscience was born in America.
Because the right of the State to tell us what to do to our bodies and the bodies of our children ends where our right to protect our lives and our children’s lives begins.
Because we believe that every life is important and we will not look the other way while those vulnerable to vaccine injury and death are being sacrificed in the name of the greater good.
Because when the State considers one of us to be expendable, then we are all considered expendable.
We are the daughters and sons of liberty. And we will defend freedom of thought and conscience and religion in this great country of ours because that is what it means to be an American.
Before it is too late, browse our site and go to NVICAdvocacy.org to learn how to become a vaccine freedom advocate in your state.
It’s your health. Your family. Your choice.
Click to View and Access References

CDC Admits Flu Shots Fail Half the Time

Posted 4/26/2016

                                       

By Barbara Loe Fisher 

To activate and view hyperlinked references, please click here once and then click any superscripted number below to access a hyperlinked reference, or scroll down to the bottom of the article to view all hyperlinked references

Americans have never been big fans of flu shots. During the 2009 “swine flu” influenza A pandemic, only about 40 percent of adults bothered to roll up their sleeves. ¹ Last year, flu vaccine rates were still just 47 percent for adults but pediatricians had vaccinated 75 percent of children under two years old. ²

Perhaps it is because parents are being thrown out of pediatricians’ offices if they don’t give their children every federally recommended vaccine – or maybe it is just because adults can talk about how they felt after getting vaccinated and infants and children under age two cannot.

How many times has someone told you: “The year I got a flu shot is the only year I got sick” or maybe you learned that the hard way yourself after getting vaccinated.

Doctors insist that just because we get sick with a fever, headache, body aches and a terrible cough that hangs on for weeks after getting vaccinated, it doesn’t mean the vaccine made us sick. They say it was just a “coincidence” because correlation does not equal causation. ^{3 4}

Well, that may be true some of the time, but now the CDC is admitting that flu shots don’t prevent influenza most of the time. ⁵ In fact, studies show that a history of seasonal flu shots can even make people more susceptible to getting sick with a fever, headache, body aches and a terrible cough that hangs on for weeks! ⁶ But just like with pertussis infections, a lot of people also get and transmit influenza infections without showing any symptoms at all. ^{7 8 9}

Previous Flu Shots Raised Risks for Pandemic Flu

During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, scientists in the Netherlands asked a big question: Do annual flu shots preventing natural influenza A infections in infants and young people increase their risk of illness and death when a highly pathogenic pandemic influenza strain develops and circulates? ¹⁰ The answer to that big question was “Yes” when, in 2010, Canadian health officials confirmed that school aged children and healthy young adults, who had gotten a flu shot the previous season, were at twice the risk of coming down with pandemic A swine flu in 2009 that was severe enough to require a trip to the doctor’s office. ¹¹

Then, between 2011 and 2014, researchers in Europe published a number of studies providing evidence that immune responses to natural influenza infections and vaccinations are quite different, and very much affect the quality and length of immunity. ¹²

Most People Don’t Show Flu Symptoms, Vaccinated People More Likely to Get Sick

Here is what they found when they studied the 2009/2010 pandemic flu season:

• First, repeated annual flu shots may hamper certain kinds of immune responses, making young vaccinated children, who have never been naturally infected with influenza virus, “more susceptible to infection with a pandemic influenza virus of a novel subtype.” ¹³
• Second, about 75 percent of children and adults who got influenza didn’t show any symptoms, and those who did have symptoms self managed without needing medical attention. Plus, hospitalizations and death rates for confirmed influenza infections were very low in the flu pandemic.
• Third, many unvaccinated persons, who did not get sick during the pandemic flu season, were “silently” infected with pandemic influenza anyway and mounted a strong T-cell immune response to the new influenza strain. ¹⁴
• Fourth, compared with people who remained unvaccinated, those who got a pandemic flu shot were more likely to get sick with an “influenza like illness” (ILI) caused by a rhinovirus. ¹⁵

Rhinoviruses cause the common cold and other upper and lower respiratory infections that give you a fever, headache, body aches and a terrible cough that hangs on for weeks. So correlation does not always equal causation, but sometimes it really does.

Now let’s take a closer look at flu vaccine effectiveness and influenza related hospitalizations and deaths in the U.S.

CDC’s Influenza Morbidity & Mortality Numbers Don’t Add Up

For years, the CDC has been promoting the notion that flu shots are between 70 and 90 percent effective in preventing influenza ¹⁶ and everybody needs to get vaccinated because type A and type B influenza causes more than 200,000 hospitalizations and 36,000 deaths in the U.S. every year. ¹⁷

Here are the facts:

FACT: There were about 2.5 million deaths in the U.S. in 2013, mostly from heart disease, cancer and other chronic diseases. About 57,000 deaths were categorized “influenza and pneumonia” with the majority occurring in people over age 65. ¹⁸ Because pneumonia is not only a complication of influenza, but is also a complication of many other viral and bacterial respiratory infections, the breakdown for 2013 was about 3,700 influenza-classified deaths and 53,000 pneumonia deaths in all age groups, with 20 influenza deaths in infants under age one.¹⁹

FACT: A federal health agency reported that, in 2004, there were about 37,000 Americans hospitalized for influenza with patients over age 85 twice as likely to die. ²⁰ The figure of 37,000 influenza hospitalizations is five times less than the number of 200,000 the CDC has been using. That is because CDC officials came up with their influenza hospitalization "guesstimate" by counting a lot of hospitalized people, who also had pneumonia, respiratory and circulatory illnesses, which they counted as probably associated with influenza. ^{21 22}

FACT: Influenza-like-illness (ILI) symptoms, such as fever, sore throat, congestion, cough, body aches and fatigue that are severe enough to prompt a trip to the doctor, rarely turn out to be actual type A or B influenza infection. In the past two years, when the CDC tested specimens of influenza-like-illness cases, only between 3 percent and 18 percent were positive for type A or B influenza. ^{23 24} Most of the respiratory illness cases making people sick enough to seek medical care were caused by other viruses or bacteria.
So just how effective IS that flu shot your doctor tells you to get every year? ²⁵

Flu Vaccine Effectiveness: From Zero to Low

After studying influenza infections during 2012-2013 in the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Washington and Pennsylvania, U.S. public health officials reported in 2015 that flu vaccine effectiveness was quite low: between 39 percent and 66 percent, depending upon the influenza strain. ²⁶
Here is what else they learned:

• For adults over age 65 years, vaccine effectiveness was close to ZERO.
• There was “unexpectedly low vaccine effectiveness for the influenza A strain among older children compared to other age groups,” especially for those who had gotten previous annual flu shots.
• S. health officials also found that unvaccinated people were more likely to report their general health status as “excellent” compared to vaccinated people.

In January 2016, U.S. government officials finally publicly admitted that flu vaccines are only 50 to 60 percent effective at preventing lab confirmed influenza requiring medical care in most years. ²⁷  In fact, a CDC analysis of flu vaccine effectiveness for the past decade – from 2005 to 2015 - demonstrated that more than half the time, seasonal flu shots are less than 50 percent effective!

In 2004-2005, the flu shot failed 90 percent of the time, ²⁸ and last year failed 77 percent of the time. ²⁹ Estimates for flu shot effectiveness this year is a not very impressive 59 percent. ³⁰

Public Health Doctors Push Ineffective, Reactive Flu Vaccine

The sad part is that public health doctors have known since the first influenza vaccine was licensed in 1945, that influenza vaccines don’t work very well. ^{31 3233} But that did not stop them from recommending in 2010 that every child and adult should get an annual flu shot starting at six months old and through the last year of life. ³⁴ And by 2013, health care workers declining an annual flu shot were being fired from their jobs. ^{35 36 37}

This is being done, despite the fact that influenza vaccine reactions causing inflammation of the nerves, known as Guillain Barre Syndrome, and other chronic health problems are the number one most compensated vaccine injuries for adults in the federal vaccine injury compensation program, ³⁸ which has awarded more than 3.3 billion dollars to victims of government recommended vaccines under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. ³⁹

Public Health Doctors Admit They Don’t Know Much About Flu Virus or How to Measure Immunity

This is being done, despite the fact that scientists know that there are several hundred types of type A, B, and C influenza viruses that are constantly recombining and creating new virus strains. ^{40 41} Public health officials admit they still do not know how to accurately predict when and how influenza viruses will mutate and which strains will be dominant in a given flu season, and they still don’t know how to measure immunity and long term protection. ^{42 43}

In 2011, Michigan epidemiologists investigated influenza infections in healthy men and women and concluded that simply measuring the number of antibodies in the blood should not be used as a surrogate for vaccine efficacy because antibody titers “may not protect.” ⁴⁴ In 2013, the CDC confirmed that high antibody titers, especially in seniors and young children, does not predict flu vaccine effectiveness. ⁴⁵

If doctors have been using an inaccurate blood test to measure immunity and vaccine efficacy for 70 years, what does that say about the accuracy of 70 years of vaccine studies?

Public health officials also admit they don’t know:

• how the genetic diversity of viruses and bacteria interact with human genes; ⁴⁶ or
• how age, natural immunity, vaccination and genetics affect individual immune responses to influenza infection; ⁴⁷ or
• how repeated natural infections and vaccinations affect individual and herd immunity. ^{48 49}

National Vaccine Plan: Flu Shots From Cradle to Grave

It is shocking that government health officials have devised a National Vaccine Plan that lobbies for every single American to get a flu shot from cradle to the grave before the real science is in. ^{50 51} Putting vaccine policy before the science is bad public health policy. Conducting uncontrolled vaccine experiments on people, who have been taught to believe and trust government health policy and now are being forced to obey strict “no exceptions” vaccine laws, has far reaching consequences. ⁵²

Go to NVIC.org and learn more. Sign up for the free NVIC Advocacy Portal and become active in your state to protect vaccine exemptions from being eliminated by the Pharma, Medical Trade and Public Health industries.

It’s your health. Your family. Your choice.

Click to View and Access References