In view of the serious damage being done to so many by vaccines, how can mandatory vaccination be constitutional? Can this be legally challenged? Get involved!
by Pam Barker | TLB staff writer/analyst
Lawmakers Protect Big Pharma
Not only has little or no testing been done to protect the consumer against vaccine products, but as ever, the corporate lobby has been working hand in hand with our lawmakers and justices to ensure the best possible deal for them.
A little history is in order. Prior to 1982, several big pharmaceutical companies had threatened to pull their products out of the US market unless they were protected against liability. At the time, the whooping cough vaccine and polio vaccine, as they then were, were causing significant physical injury and the pharmaceuticals were having to pay out large sums in compensation.
By 1986, The National Child Vaccine Injury Act was passed which, while acknowledging vaccine damage was real, nonetheless provided a no-fault way for families to be compensated while letting pharmaceutical companies largely off the hook. It had the effect of reducing the financial claims against Big Pharma thus ensuring elevated profits. A vaccine court was also set up at this time to hear cases of vaccine injury brought against the pharmaceutical industry, the burden of proof being squarely on the claimant. Monies paid out come from a federal excise tax added to the cost of each vaccine and not from the pockets of Big Pharma. To date, over $3 billion has been awarded in damages.
The 1986 law, however, still held the vaccine manufacturers partially liable for vaccine damage in cases where federal compensation was denied or where the vaccine product could have been made more safely but wasn’t. The problem was solved by the judicial branch of our government. On February 22, 2011 the U.S. Supreme Court passed a ruling which shielded drug companies from all liability for harm caused by government-mandated vaccines even when companies could have made a safer vaccine. Writes Dr. Barbara Loe Fisher:
From now on, drug companies selling vaccines in America will not be held accountable by a jury of our peers in a court of law if those vaccines brain damage us but could have been made less toxic. If you get paralyzed by a flu shot or your child has a serious reaction to a vaccine required for school and becomes learning disabled, epileptic, autistic, asthmatic, diabetic or mentally retarded, you are on your own.
Is mandatory vaccination constitutional?
Yes, it is. The case of Jacobson v. Massachussetts in 1905 established that an adult was not within his rights to refuse a smallpox vaccination because immunization was in the interests of the population:
It is within the police power of a State to enact a compulsory vaccination law, and it is for the legislature, and not for the courts, to determine in the first instance whether vaccination is or is not the best mode for the prevention of smallpox and the protection of the public health.
This decision was recently used in a 2015 case in New York as the basis for rejecting the claims of parents who were mounting a constitutional challenge at the federal level to New York state laws on immunization. At the state level previously, some of these parents had received religious exemption for their childrens’ vaccinations but objected to the regulation that requires unvaccinated children be excluded from school during the time of an outbreak. In the federal case, they claimed their liberty and religious interests were being infringed under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, which failed in the first instance. Upon appeal, the Second Circuit court cited the 1905 ruling, claiming that ‘New York was well within its “police power” to mandate vaccinations for schoolchildren. Since immunizations are “in the interest of the population as a whole,” the court said they trump the parents’ individual wishes.’
Depressingly, ‘the court brushed aside their claim that “a growing body of scientific evidence demonstrates that vaccines cause more harm to society than good,” noting that only the legislature—and not the parents or the court—could make the call on the alleged body of evidence.’
California leads the way
The push for mandatory vaccines has been going on since at least 2014, following the measles outbreak at Disneyland, with the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) monitoring up to 58 bills in 24 states for that year alone. With its two recent and highly controversial bills, California, however, has since set a legal precedent for being the only state to remove all non-medical exemptions and to deny parental choice.
California Senate Bill SB 277 was the first piece of legislation on the steep and very slippery slope of medical rights’ erosion. Passed into law on June 30, 2015 and taking effect on July 1 of this year (2016), this bill enforces vaccinations on all children in public and private schooling as well as daycare with no right to personal or religious exemption. The only ‘out’ is to withdraw your child from school and homeschool, which is evidently problematic on a financial level for most parents, for the quality of a child’s education, and for a child’s constitutional right to a public education. Writes California Coalition for Vaccine Choice [emphasis mine]:
Families that do not comply with the one-size-fits-all vaccine mandate will lose their State Constitutional right for a free and appropriate education in public and private K-12 schools. The use of licensed daycare facilities, in-home daycare, public or private preschools and even after school care programs are also included in SB 277. School aged children, not up-to-date on every mandated vaccine, will be required to home school without options for classroom learning.
Medical Exemption Ineffective
A medical exemption is still in place but available to an impossibly small percentage of children [emphasis mine]:
In 2016, California parents will be forced to give their children more than 40 doses of 10 federally recommended vaccines. This open-ended vaccine mandate allows the State of California to add any additional vaccines they deem necessary at anytime. The only exemption available is a medical exemption that doctors deny to 99.99 percent of children under federal guidelines.
Dr. Loe Fisher explains why this percentage is necessarily miniscule and why the medical exemption is almost unlikely ever to be enacted:
Basically, the Centers for Disease Control now tells doctors that a medical vaccine exemption should only be granted if you are one of the estimated 320,000 children and adults annually receiving chemotherapy; or one of the estimated 47,000 Americans who have had a recent organ or blood cell transplant; or your child is one of the 40 to 100 children born every year with Severe Combined Immune Deficiency, known as SCID.
Once you are done with chemo, no medical vaccine exemption for you. Once you have recovered from your organ or blood cell transplant, no medical vaccine exemption for you. And if you are immunosuppressed but don’t have SCID, the rarest and most severe of all immunodeficiency disorders, in most cases no medical exemption for you.
In the case of SB792, passed on September 8, 2015 and regarded as the companion bill to SB277, it’s the first bill to mandate vaccines for all adults who work in childcare jobs both in the public and private sectors including preschool programs. It forbids any kind of exemption on personal or religious grounds; medical exemption is permitted based on a doctor’s decision and based on past vaccination history. Those who refuse face criminal penalties and loss of employment.
The specified vaccines are for influenza, measles and whopping cough, which can only be administered in combination with other antigens. For example, the measles vaccines is only given in combination with shots for mumps and rubella. So workers will be vaccinated with a total of seven antigens in three vaccines. As we’ve seen in the case of medical exemptions for children, it is unlikely that too many exemptions will be granted. The law comes into effect on September 1, 2016.
Ethan Huff makes the following useful point concerning the status of the individual:
An affront to both medical and religious liberty, SB 792 appears to be the wave of the future in New America, where the perceived health of the “herd” is now more important than the health of the individual. Never before in the history of the United States have legislators pushed this hard to literally force vaccine injections on the public under duress. But why do they feel the need to do this if vaccines really work and are truly safe as claimed?
Corporate Backing in CA
To understand why California lawmakers have been such big supporters of these laws, Christina Sarich reports how Big Pharma and their trade groups contributed over $2 million to members of the legislature before the first bill was enacted:
Nine of the top 20 recipients of these funds are either members of the Senate health committee, or leaders who could influence the outcome of the bill, as well as push it through to law. One senator, in particular, is also a doctor, Richard Pan, who received more than $95,000 in campaign cash. He also just happens to be the man who wrote the bill.
Further, more than $500,000 was given to outside organizations that worked to get these officials elected, and almost $3 million was given to the 2013-2014 legislative session to lobby agencies such as the state pharmacists’ board.
So what can we do?
Dr. Mercola writes that there are six ways in which legislation is working to restrict our rights. They are:
| Mandatory vaccines | Adults in the workplace; children |
| Vaccine exemptions | Restrict or eliminate (personal, religious, medical) |
| Tracking and data sharing | Expand this to enforce compliance |
| Police and emergency powers | Expand these powers in times of public health emergencies |
| Pharmacists | Expand their role to administer more vaccines |
| Mandatory publishing | Applies to vaccination rates and exemptions in small communities such as schools |
We can see that the California legislation is operating on the first and second legal pathways.
Become an advocate in your state
The first thing we can do is to find out what legislation is being planned in our respective states, and then become an advocate against it (it is minimal admittedly, but there actually is proposed legislation out there which endorses our rights).
The National Vaccine Information Centre (NVIC) has a clear state-by-state tracking system for all upcoming leglislation, with clear descriptors of what each piece of legislation entails. Here is the link : https://nvicadvocacy.org/members/Home.aspx
Carry a card
Dr. Rima Laibow of Natural Solutions Foundation is a campaigner for launching an investigation into whether or not vaccines contain Nagalese. Her page (link below) gives us many possible ways to get involved.
One of these options is to carry a card on us that gives advanced notification based on the legal right to informed consent objection. Called an ‘Advanced Vaccine Directive’, it appeals to the law of informed consent, a law which was upheld by the US Supreme Court in the case of Missouri v. McNeely (2013) which ruled, according to Dr. Laibow, that we have the right to control what needles are put in our bodies. By carrying this card, we are giving advanced notice that we do not consent to vaccination and that if forced on us, the party will be committing a crime. See the following link: www.DrRimaTruthReports.com
Can a Legal Challenge Be Mounted Against Mandatory Vaccination?
Dr. Laibow believes so as does Washington state lawyer, James Deal JD.
He bases his argument on several important points discussed thus far: the ineffectiveness of certain vaccines, the damage and death caused, the viral shedding phenomenon, the lack of vaccine testing, the lack of informed consent, and the misinformation put about by the government about vaccine safety.
Mandatory vaccination, argues Catherine J. Frompovich reporting on Deal’s work, is a violation ‘of public trust and [ ] breach of social contract, if citizens of the USA are supposed to live in a free society … Where are our rights of self-determination? Do children belong to their parents, or to the state?’
Says State of the Nation editor,
No entity under the sun has the right or lawful authority to arrogate power unto itself to harm or injure, sicken or infect, paralyze or kill the people of this nation. Not only is such conduct by the state a serious breach of the social contract, it represents a profound violation of the public trust. Vaccination programs therefore break the inviolable bond between the citizenry and the government.
Cue The Council on Foreign Relations …
If only out of curiosity, it’s useful to know what the elites officially think about this issue. Writing originally for the LA Times, Laurie Garrett and Maxine Builder published a commentary piece in 2014 using words like ‘paranoia’ and ‘conspiratorial’ to describe anyone opposed to vaccination. Bizarrely linking the Pakistani Taliban to concerned citizens of the US, who both share a suspicion of vaccines and those who dispense them, these writers condescend to pass judgement on us thus [emphasis mine]:
The general public has proved its inability to weigh facts accurately and reach a rational conclusion when fear clouds its judgment. Remarkably, in the case of the purported associations between autism and vaccines, the concept has gone viral in some of America’s most highly educated and wealthy communities, as has unscientific advice about delaying certain immunizations to avoid “vaccine overload.”
Yes indeed, it is the more affluent and educated in society who are questioning the safety of vaccines. Our irrationality must be really worrying them.
In closing, I give the final word to Dr. Jayne Donegan, a UK physician who turned vaccine activist and successfully fought her own battle with the British General Medical Council. She investigated disease rates back to the end of the 19th century, before many vaccines were introduced, and observed how death rates for diseases like measles and whooping cough had dramatically declined by the 1940s, well before the introduction of immunization programs around the early 1960s [emphasis mine]:
My long, slow journey researching the vaccination disease ecology involved learning about other models and philosophies of health and the gradual realization that it was true what people had told me all along, that “health is the only immunity.”
We don’t need to be protected from “out there.” We get infectious diseases when our body needs to have a periodic clean-out. Children especially benefit from childhood spotty rashes, or “ex anthems” as they are called, in order to make appropriate developmental leaps. When we have fevers, coughs, rashes, we need to treat them supportively, not suppressively.
*********
About the author:
Pam Barker is a TLB staff writer/analyst. She has an extensive background in the educational system of several countries at the college and university level as a teacher and administrator.
References
1 http://educate-yourself.org/cn/rappoportinterviewvaccineresearcherjan2002.shtml
4 https://casetext.com/case/henning-jacobson-v-commonwealth-of-massachusetts
6 http://www.nvic.org/nvic-vaccine-news/august-2015/sb277-fallout-what-happens-next.aspx
8 http://www.nvic.org/NVIC-Vaccine-News/May-2015/blackmail-and-the-medical-vaccine-exemption.aspx
9http://www.naturalnews.com/049811_mandated_vaccinations_California_law_childcare_workers.html
10 http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=19729
13 http://everydayconcerned.net/tag/nagalase-in-vaccines/
14 http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=12072
15 http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20141102/OPINION03/141109943
Leave a Reply