Fellow Board-certified Pediatrician Blasts Senator Dr. Pan for California Bill that Removes Medical Freedom

As a board-certified pediatrician, I am embarrassed by the article, “FAAP helps change California vaccine law,” published on June 30th, 2015. California State Senator Richard J. Pan, M.D., a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics (FAAP), sponsored the bill, SB 277, that Governor Jerry Brown has just signed into law. This law removes the informed consent process and takes the right to make medical, philosophical, and religious decisions away way from parents. If you decide in tandem with your doctor to forgo just one vaccine on the state-mandated schedule, your child will no longer be able to attend public or private school in California, and will also be barred from daycare. Physicians in California will now no longer be allowed to fairly and honestly explain the pros and cons of various vaccines to families. With the state legislature making medical decisions for families by threatening to exclude children from school, the physician-patient relationship becomes irrelevant. “I hope that it causes parents to receive information about vaccines, to have conversations with their pediatrician and other health care professionals and rethink why they had concerns about vaccines, (and) that they will become more open to listening to the actual science and facts and turn away from the misinformation that’s been peddled by too many people,” Senator Pan told the AAP. The truth is that it is Senator Pan, Governor Brown, and many of my mainstream medical peers who need to “turn away from the misinformation that’s been peddled” to the doctors by the Centers for Disease Control, the AAP, and the pharmaceutical companies that profit enormously by this new program of forced vaccines.