DDP Newsletter July 2019 Vol. XXXV, No. 4
As the number of parents who decline to follow the CDC’s “recommended” schedule of mandatory vaccines creeps upward, the pressure to remove exemptions is growing. More than 100 bills are being pushed in 30 states that would strip out religious, philosophical, and medical exemptions.
California leads the nation in removing all except rare medical exemptions. Until this year, physicians could write medical exemptions at their discretion. However, because a few “rogue” physicians were allegedly writing too many or “illegitimate” exemptions, it is becoming virtually impossible to obtain one, so that parents of children with risk factors will now have the choice of risking a serious adverse reaction or removing their child from public or private school. The full impact of the law will not be seen until it is implemented in 2020, but parents are already receiving messages like this one:
“The new laws have left us no choice but to stop writing any vaccine medical exemptions after December 31, 2019. Any new exemptions must meet strict CDC contraindication criteria, under which the vast majority of patients will not qualify. Unfortunately, if Dr. *** or I were to write 5 or more medical exemptions in a calendar year, this may automatically trigger review of all previous exemptions we have ever written, so that even grandfathered exemptions may no longer be valid….”
All vaccine exemptions are now overseen by one person, Dr. Charity Dean of the California Public Health Dept., a friend of Sen. Richard Pan, M.D., who ramrodded S.B. 276 through the legislature. Starting in 2016, Dr. Dean had been involved in a campaign to gather information on physicians writing exemptions, for the purpose of filing licensure board complaints and opening permanent investigations. A statewide initiative now commands county pubic health officers to request administrators and school nurses to send for review the medical records of all children with exemptions (tinyurl.com/yxteeuuw).
Now underway are more than 180 investigations of more than 70 physicians, who are being judged by the medical board’s own definition of standard of care, rather than by the law, which gave broad discretion to physicians, based on family history, genetics, and use of the latest relevant research (ibid.).
Health insurers have increased their incentives for physicians who have fully vaccinated practices, so the large majority of California physicians have a policy of refusing service to partially vaccinated and unvaccinated patients, regardless of medical reasons. Finding a physician’s office in California who will accept a child who is not fully vaccinated is close to impossible. Earlier this year, Parents for Healthcare Rights conducted a survey of 882 pediatric offices in California, and every office said they did not do any medical exemption evaluations, regardless of medical history (ibid.).
Healthy People 2020, published by the federal Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, claims that for each birth cohort vaccinated with the routine immunization schedule…, society saves 33,000 lives and prevents 14 million cases of disease.” It is unclear what disease would have caused those deaths—perhaps influenza: “approximately 42,000 adults and 300 children in the United States die each year from vaccine-preventable diseases.” A footnote says that these include influenza, but not the deaths from H1N1 flu in 2009 (https://tinyurl.com/p8mgmts).
“Deliberate predation” by a “four-headed monster”—a “very powerful, well-funded, well-oiled” antivaccination campaign—is responsible for the recent outbreak of measles in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in New York City, according to Dr. Peter Hotez of Baylor College of Medicine. He complained about “more than 480 anti-vaccine misinformation sites” on the internet and the anti-vaccine misinformation books that have “taken over Amazon.” He claims that reports of serious adverse effects (“misinformation”) have contributed to “horrifically low HPV [human papilloma virus] vaccination” rates in this country (https://tinyurl.com/y68xzhnd).
The U.S. has barely retained its coveted World Health Organization (WHO) “measles free” designation, finding no circulation of a single strain for 12 months.
Advocates of mandatory vaccination are successfully getting vaccine skeptics de-platformed from social media (https://tinyurl.com/yx9j9gtv), discussions within medical organizations, and press release distribution services such as EIN Newswire. And Facebook will be reminding you to get your flu shot and checkups (tinyurl.com/y292vohx).
The current public-health panic over an outbreak with no deaths is in stark contrast to concerns about introducing a new measles vaccine in the 1960s, especially in the UK. These included: atypical, vaccine-induced measles; rapidly waning immunity; the unpredictable long-term consequences of introducing a live virus (“cytopathic agent”); and lack of public acceptance of a vaccine for “prevention of what is generally an unproblematic illness,” leading to resistance against vaccination. But enthusiasm to eradicate measles “because we can” prevailed (Am J Pub Health 2013;103:1293-1401, tinyurl.com/y3zys5dh).
Measles has not been eradicated—but natural herd immunity has been, and the illness when it occurs is four or five times worse because it is affecting infants and older persons instead of school-aged children. As Dr. Andrew Wakefield discussed in his talk on “The Sixth Extinction” at our 36th annual meeting, overvaccination could have the same results as overuse of antibiotics (https://tinyurl.com/yy6u9rdv).
Mandates for adult vaccines are probably coming soon. They are already here for workers in medical settings and day care. The European Commission’s Roadmap on Vaccination contains a timeline of deliverables, such as a “common vaccine card/passport for EU citizens.” In the U.S., the Dept. of Homeland Security already has the full authority to update, change, or add to the Real ID program any provision the government sees fit. It could conceivably prohibit unvaccinated individuals from entering any federal government property, including airports (https://tinyurl.com/y5qfa6h6).
Vaccines, it is claimed, save millions of lives worldwide every year. The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (now the GAVI Alliance), founded in 2000 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is dedicated to “immunisation for all.” Thus, it seems curious that Bill Gates in his 2010 TED Talk about energy and climate (“Innovating to Zero!”), mentioning the population challenge, said, “If we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that [projected 9 billion people by 2050] by perhaps 10 or 15 percent” (ted.com/talks/bill_gates#t-7532, about 3:28 minutes into talk). What is the effect of vaccines on population? Can HPV vaccine cause infertility, even primary ovarian failure (Holland et al., HPV Vaccine on Trial)?
With vaccines, there are many unknowns, and no certainties. Yet on the issue of mandates, many physicians feel they dare not raise any questions. It is assumed that Benefit B >> risk R when both B and R are unknown (https://tinyurl.com/yybm7oyj).
Past issues of the DDP Newsletter that concerned vaccines: July 2009, January 2011, November 2011, and March 2012 (see www.ddponline.org). Also see Civil Defense Perspectives, March 2019 (https://tinyurl.com/y4jlw6nc).