Vaccine Mandates: Ignoring Human Rights and Informed Consent
Source: The Vaccine Reaction
The U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee held a hearing on Mar. 5, 2019 titled “Vaccines Save Lives: What is Driving Preventable Disease Outbreaks?”
The very title of the hearing tips the committee’s hand. “Vaccines save lives” is a conclusive statement that preemptively answers the question that follows, making it clear there would be no divergent exploration of the question of what is driving preventable disease outbreaks. Even further, while it is true that some vaccines may save some lives, it is also true that vaccines are not studied for their unintended long- and short-term effects on the body, and that many people’s bodies respond to vaccines in ways that prove harmful to them.
The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) has paid out more than $4 billion dollars for vaccine injuries since 1988.1 The passive reporting system for vaccine injuries, VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System), which captures between one and 10 percent of all adverse reactions,2 receives thousands of reports of injury every year.
If vaccines are saving lives, they are also doing it at the expense of those who are injured or killed by those same vaccines. Where is the “greater good” in that?
Reviewing the testimony of those selected to give testimony in the Senate hearing, they all beat a predictable drum: more mandates for more vaccines to be given to more people. There was a push to curtail parental rights and eliminate vaccine exemptions to those vaccines. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now recommends 69 doses of 16 vaccines be given to children before age 18, with hundreds of vaccines in the pipeline. Many of these vaccines are fast-tracked for approval without adequate safety studies, and each carries both known and unknown risks.
Vaccines are a medical intervention given to healthy people that carry a risk of death and serious or debilitating consequences for some individuals. Because of this risk, there must always be choice!
Who will be allowed to speak in Congress to the issue of human rights, the ethic of medical informed consent, and the right to bodily integrity and autonomy when it comes to vaccine mandates? The United States has confronted and repudiated the ugliness that comes with eugenics, utilitarianism, and medical experimentation in the labs at Tuskegee and the courts of Nuremberg following the horrors of Nazi medical experimentation on human subjects.
Although it is currently in fashion to think otherwise, the science is not settled on vaccines. There is not adequate testing on vaccines to make assurances of safety (new vaccines are usually tested against other vaccines, not inert placebos), and there has never been a true scientifically credible study of those who are vaccinated compared to those who are completely unvaccinated.
It is a violation of human rights to use people as guinea pigs in the great vaccine experiment, and it is immoral for the government to collude with the pharmaceutical companies through the use of vaccine mandates.
There was no one on the panel of witnesses at the Mar. 5 Senate hearing who gave a voice to that point of view. Why was Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a longtime advocate of vaccine safety and an expert on vaccine policy and informed consent, not called to testify? Why was a high school student who has spoken with friends and done a bit of Google research asked to participate in a hearing of such serious magnitude when parents of vaccine injured children—people who vaccinated their children in good faith and paid a horrible price—have been left out of the conversation?
If we applaud this child’s right to make medical choices, shouldn’t the choice of informed parents who have come to a different conclusion also be included? Are we abandoning the fundamental American value of intelligent dissent in favor of totalitarianism?
It’s hard not to conclude that this hearing was set up as a one-sided, unfair and incomplete conversation with a pre-determined outcome. Shame.
I will close with the words of Dr. Christine Stabell Benn, a vaccine researcher and Professor of Global Health at the University of Southern Denmark. Dr. Benn’s opinion was published in The Times of London on Mar. 2, 2019 in response to a previous article about vaccine hesitancy…
As a vaccine researcher, I strongly oppose mandatory vaccination. The vaccines that are in use were only tested for effects on the vaccine-targeted disease and on side effects in relation to the vaccination. However, there is increasing evidence that vaccines also affect the immune system broadly, reducing or enhancing susceptibility to unrelated diseases. Hence, the vaccine skeptics have a right to point out that we do not know the full effects of vaccines on overall health. It should therefore be a human right to weigh pros, cons and unknowns to make one’s own decision.3
References:
1 Health Resources & Services Administration. Vaccine Injury Compensation Data. HRSA.gov.
2 National Vaccine Information Center. Can Measles Vaccine Cause Injury & Death? NVIC.org.
3 Stabell Benn C. Times Letters: Immunisation science and ‘vaccine hesitancy’. The Times Mar. 2, 2019.