The international journal Science of the Total Environment has just published a compelling study from the Republic of Korea, where autism prevalence is high. The study identifies a strong relationship between prenatal and early childhood exposure to mercury and autistic behaviors in five-year-olds.
The French government announced that it might make 11 vaccines compulsory for children, adding to the three already mandatory shots (diphtheria, tetanus, and polio). Under the new jurisdiction, parents would be forced to follow a vaccination schedule including jabs against measles, hepatitis B, meningitis C, rubella, mumps and whooping cough. This change of heart comes after the Conseil d'Etat, France's highest administrative court, ruled in favour of parents who chose not to vaccinate their children, as the three mandatory shots were not available separately, but only in one shot combined with additional vaccines. The former Health Ministry opposed making these three vaccines available for people, which led the court to give the new government 6 months in order to find a solution. In the largest study on vaccine confidence to date, France was found to be the least confident in vaccine safety out of 66 countries surveyed, with 41 percent respondents disagreeing with the claim that vaccines are safe. The skepticism isn’t limited to the general population; a quarter of French practitioners aren’t confident about the risk and efficacy of vaccines, either.
Informed consent means you have the legal right to be fully and accurately informed about the benefits and risks of a medical intervention, including a pharmaceutical product, and are free to make a voluntary decision about whether to accept the risk for yourself or your minor child without being coerced or punished for the decision you make. Informed consent has guided the ethical practice of medicine since the Doctor’s Trial at Nuremberg after World War II, where the informed consent principle was internationally acknowledged as a human right for individuals participating in scientific research. Today, informed consent to medical risk taking also means you have the legal right to be fully and accurately informed by a doctor or medical facility about the benefits and risks of a lab test, surgical procedure, prescription drug or other medical intervention performed on you or your minor child and give your voluntary permission.
The American Medical Association (AMA) has released a position statement that opposes the creation of a new federal commission on vaccine safety whose task is to study the association between autism and vaccines. “The AMA fully supports the overwhelming body of evidence and rigorous scientific process used by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices which demonstrate vaccines are among the most effective and safest interventions to both prevent individual illness and protect the health of the public,” William E. Kobler, MD said in a statement. Dr. Kobler is a member of the AMA Board of Trustees. Autism is occurring at epidemic rates. We now have over 1,000,000 U.S. children diagnosed with autism. Something in our environment is responsible for causing the autism epidemic. It is not due to genetics. Could it be the increasing numbers of vaccines given to our children? Why wouldn’t any rational person want to study this association? A simple study comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children could help decide whether vaccines are responsible for causing the autism epidemic. But, the Powers-That-Be, like the AMA, do not want this study done as it may turn their world upside down. In response to the AMA edicts supporting more vaccines and stating that no further research is needed, I and my colleagues have released a reply to the AMA letter.
As we have reported frequently here at Health Impact News, sales of drugs to lower cholesterol are the top selling drugs of all time. It is a $100 billion a year industry. The cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor is the best-selling drug of all time, grossing over $140 billion, with no serious close competitors in the history of pharmaceutical drugs. One out of every four Americans over the age of 50 is taking a statin drug to lower their cholesterol. However, these block buster drugs have run through their patent life, and now generics dominate the market. So Big Pharma is looking at new ways to patent new drugs to lower your cholesterol. The latest? A vaccine is being developed to lower your cholesterol. In recent years, class action lawsuits have been stacking up against statin drug manufacturers due to the terrible side effects, including diabetes. Is this another reason for turning to vaccines to "cure" cholesterol? In this country, lawsuits against vaccines are prohibited while civil suits against prescription or over-the-counter drugs are allowed.
Nearly every year, there are outbreaks of infectious diseases in the U.S. in which the communities involved were highly vaccinated and, thus, supposedly immune. In each of those situations there was an illusion of protection. It wasn’t real. There was no herd immunity. This has certainly been true for pertussis. In science, when a theory is disproven, the scientific thing to do is to put it aside and develop a new theory for explaining something. That is not what doctors, public health officials, legislators, and the media are doing. Instead, they are clinging to a disproven theory and using it to justify mandating vaccination for everyone and shaming those who choose to exercise their informed consent rights and reconsider this medical intervention.
The number of parents questioning the wisdom of the currently recommended schedule is up and corroboration is easy to find. An article in the journal Pediatrics in August 2016 reported that the number of pediatricians encountering parents who either question vaccine safety or refuse one or more vaccines or want to use an alternative vaccination schedule for their children increased from just under 75 percent in 2006 to 87 percent by 2013. Some physicians resort to denying medical care to children if parents refuse to give their children all federally recommended vaccines according to the CDC’s recommended schedule.
Somehow, a measles outbreak of unvaccinated Somali citizens in Minnesota is supposed to drive a stake in those of us who raise questions about the safety and efficacy of FDA-approved vaccines. According to the powers-that-be, this outbreak of measles is proof that we need more vaccinations, not less. I beg to differ. And, I will make my argument citing the Brady principle.
We are three months into the 2017 state legislative sessions and our NVIC Advocacy Team has already tracked 173 vaccine related bills across 40 states and two federal bills on the NVIC Advocacy Portal. We have added 39 new bills since our last update at the end of February. Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana and Michigan are five new states that have bills introduced for the first time this session! If you live in one of the following states, there have been bills filed that can affect your rights: AL, AR, AZ, CO, CT, FL, GA, HI, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT, NE, NH, NJ, NV, NY, OK, OR, PA, RI, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA, and WV (states in bold have bills that are still active and need your action and states not bolded have bills that have already passed or died.) The following states are priority OPPOSITION alert states as they now have active bills to restrict or eliminate vaccine exemptions: CT, MN, NY, PA, RI, and TX. The following states are priority SUPPORT alert states as they now have active bills to add or expand vaccine exemptions: CO, MI, NJ, NY, OK, OR, RI, TN, TX, and WA. Please log in to NVICAdvocacy.org and click on your state team tab to see what is happening in your state and what you can do to help. If there is no immediate emergency action alert information posted, scroll down and look at the “bill information” section for all bills in your state, our position, updated status, current requested action, and links to more information.
We are gathered in our nation’s Capitol representing many thousands of Americans and their families, who cannot be here today because they are sick or caring for someone who is sick. We are here for families and physicians living in fear they will be discriminated against and punished if they speak honestly in their communities about what they know to be true. We have come to defend freedom of thought, speech, and conscience, the inalienable natural rights that unite us, regardless of where we live, the color of our skin, the faith that sustains us, or the philosophies that define us. We are calling on the government to do its job and protect the people’s health - instead of protecting profit-making industries doing business with government and manipulating information released by the mainstream media. We are advocating for the right to know the truth about the safety of the food we eat, the water we drink, the drugs doctors prescribe and the vaccines Americans are forced to get to attend school, and receive medical care, and hold a job. And we are here to witness the suffering of our children, who have no voice and have no choice except the one that we, their mothers and fathers, give to them. We want government officials to explain to us why our country, which spends the most on healthcare and has one of the highest child vaccination rates in the world, is crippled by a chronic disease and disability epidemic that costs more than two trillion dollars a year and has created the sickest child and young adult population in America’s history.
