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Chicago Principles on Vaccination Choice |
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Calls for immediate Action in the United States |
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Harris interactive Poll—May 2010 |
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Public Discussion Presentation |
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Frequently Asked Questions about Vaccines |
THE CHICAGO PRINCIPLES ON VACCINATION CHOICE
We, the people who affirm our belief in personal rights, in order to promote the general health and welfare for ourselves and our children and to establish justice, advocate the following principles:
1. The right to free and informed consent to all medical interventions, including vaccination, is a fundamental human right. This includes the right to refuse any medical intervention, including vaccination.
2. Laws that make education, employment, day care and public benefits contingent on vaccination status, except in extreme public health emergencies, violate the fundamental human right to vaccination choice.
3. Laws that sanction nondisclosure of known medical risks, including risks of vaccination, violate the fundamental human right to free and informed consent for all medical interventions.
4. A safety first agenda must apply to vaccination policy. No government should have the right to recommend or mandate vaccines until impartial scientific research has documented their relative safety.
5. Individuals who evaluate, recommend, and mandate vaccines must be free of all actual and perceived conflicts of interest.
For more information:
www.centerforpersonalrights.org
CALLS FOR IMMEDIATE ACTION IN THE UNITED STATES
1. Every state should permit philosophical exemption to vaccination mandates, upholding the human right to free and informed consent for all medical interventions. Without the real right to say no, current policy is coercive and lacks legitimacy.
2. Congress should conduct oversight hearings on the national vaccine program, including mandates for the military and immigrants, vaccine safety, conflicts of interest, suppression of science, evidence of vaccine injury, and comparative empirical data from countries with differing vaccination schedules.
3. Congress should immediately initiate a prospective study of vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations for long-term health outcomes. Such a baseline study has never been done, suggesting that the vaccination schedule as a whole is an experiment on human subjects. This bill is called the “Comprehensive Comparative Study of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Populations Act” and was originally cosponsored by Rep. Maloney (D-NY) and Rep. Osborne (R-NE).
4. Congress should amend the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act to reinstate ordinary tort liability for vaccine manufacturers and medical professionals. Liability protections in the 1986 Law have fueled the expansion of the vaccine schedule and have not made vaccines safer, as the Law required.
5. Congress should abolish the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program or make it optional. The Program has failed in its purpose to quickly, generously, and administratively compensate families for vaccine injury.
HARRIS INTERACTIVE POLL — MAY 2010
In May 2010, global marketing research firm Harris Interactive conducted an online survey of 1,144 parents with children age seventeen or younger within the United States. This survey was conducted on behalf of the Center for Personal Rights, Inc. via its ParentQuery omnibus product.
Figures for age, sex, race and ethnicity, education, region, household income, and the age of children in the household were weighted where necessary to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online.
Respondents for this survey were selected from among those who have agreed to participate in Harris Interactive surveys. The data have been weighted to reflect the composition of the parent population. Because the sample is based on those who agreed to participate in the Harris Interactive panel, no estimates of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.
According to the final report:
• 52% believe that “parents should have the right to decide which vaccines their children receive without government mandates.”
• 54% of parents are “concerned that the pharmaceutical industry has undue influence over government vaccine mandates.”
• 54% of parents agree that “the government should fund an independent scientific study of fully vaccinated vs. unvaccinated individuals to assess long-term health outcomes.”
• 48% of parents are “concerned about serious adverse effects of vaccines.”
• 42% of parents, a minority, agree that “all children should receive 69 doses of 16 vaccines before age 18, as recommended by the federal government.”*
For full poll results and complete survey methodology, including weighting variables, see the seventy-eight-page full statistical report available at www.centerforpersonalrights.org.
CENTER FOR PERSONAL RIGHTS
Public Discussion Presentations
The Center for Personal Rights (CPR) is a non-profit organization that advocates for the rights to life, liberty, and personal security for ourselves and our children. CPR demands the universal human rights standard of informed consent to all medical interventions. Compulsory vaccination is morally and legally unjustifiable.
As part of its mission, CPR has compiled information and data on vaccination choice for public presentations. Below are a few slides from the presentation, “The Conversation: Vaccination Is A Human Right.” You can download the full PowerPoint presentation at www.centerforpersonalrights.org.
FREQUENTLY AsKED QUESTIONS ABOUT VACCINES
“vaccines are Effective”
1. Vaccines are modern medicine’s greatest achievement. Haven’t they saved the developed world from the scourge of infectious disease?
Response: Better nutrition, clean water, modern sanitation, hygiene, improved living and working conditions, and antibiotics have played essential and under-appreciated roles in public health. Many infectious diseases were almost gone by the time vaccination mandates began. Vaccines have played a role in decreasing infectious disease, but they’ve also injured and taken lives. Vaccine package inserts document a long list of possible side effects and death that can occur after vaccination. The government administers a special program to compensate for vaccine injury or death. Because every vaccination decision is potentially a life-and-death decision or may affect future quality of life, free and informed consent is imperative. Individuals must have the right to decide for themselves and their children if and when to vaccinate. If vaccines are truly safe and effective, the vast majority will want them, with no need for mandates.
2. Vaccines save lives. Don’t vaccines overwhelmingly benefit the individual and society?
Response: Look at the health of children in the United States today. One in six has a learning disability; one in nine has asthma; one in twelve has ADD; one in eighty-eight has autism. The United States ranks forty-ninth in infant mortality in the world, below every industrialized country except Poland (www.tinyurl.com/24s4d7). Vaccines have helped to diminish infectious diseases, but they have not ensured good health. We are experiencing an alarming increase in a wide range of chronic, neurological, and autoimmune childhood diseases and disorders. The extent to which vaccines play a role in these childhood diseases and disorders is largely unstudied, but some evidence suggests strong associations.
3. Vaccines work. Don’t vaccines protect us against deadly diseases?
Response: Immunity from vaccines is temporary; it wears off over time. Only natural immunity acquired through actual infection and boosted through exposure to disease in the community gives lifelong immunity. Vaccines rely on “booster” shots to maintain antibodies. This is the reason it is recommended that children get six doses of each vaccine for diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus, four doses of each vaccine for polio, haemophilus influenzae type b and pneumococcal disease, three doses of each vaccine for hepatitis B, rotavirus and human papillomavirus, and two doses of each vaccine for measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox and hepatitis A. Scientists initially believed that vaccines would afford lifelong immunity. As disease outbreaks increasingly occurred among the vaccinated, mandates for vaccine boosters became commonplace. Even in communities where 98+% of the population is “fully vaccinated” for a particular disease, creating so-called herd immunity, outbreaks among the vaccinated still occur (www.tinyurl.com/d5l8vm, www.tinyurl.com/27sexxd).
“Vaccines Are Safe”
4. Adverse reactions to vaccines are exceptionally rare. Aren’t death and injuries caused by vaccines necessary risks that all members of the community must accept as the price of citizenship?
Response: All human beings are entitled to life, liberty, and security of person. A society that protects fundamental human rights does not discriminate on the basis of age or genetic predisposition or mandate a practice in peacetime or in the absence of a true public health emergency that is known to cause injury and death. Doctors often fail to recognize injuries and underreport them because we have a voluntary Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). There are no penalties for failure to report injuries and it is estimated that one to ten percent of adverse events are reported. Inclusion in VAERS does not prove causation, and little research has investigated alleged vaccine injuries. Most doctors are uninformed about vaccine adverse events and are unaware of how to best help their patients when these adverse events happen. By law, doctors bear no liability for vaccine injury. Furthermore, our understanding of the nature and mechanism of vaccine-induced injury and death is limited, in part because we have failed to study the long-term health outcomes of fully vaccinated compared with unvaccinated individuals.
5. Vaccines are scientifically sound. Aren’t vaccines extremely well-researched for optimal safety by independent government scientists with children’s and society’s best interests at heart?
Response: Like all prescription medications, vaccines are considered “unavoidably unsafe” by law. Doctors give infants over thirty doses of “unavoidably unsafe” medications by fifteen months of age, usually without full and detailed informed consent. Nonetheless, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states on its website that “vaccines are held to the highest standard of safety” (www.tinyurl.com/2dwf8x9). In reality, vaccines have not been well-researched. There has never been a study comparing the long-term health outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations. Vaccines have not been studied cumulatively, in the way that they are administered. They are tested individually, in isolation, for very short periods of time by the vaccine manufacturers themselves, who are protected from almost all legal liability. Furthermore, many of the decision makers for vaccination recommendations and mandates have serious conflicts of interest—some are even vaccine patent holders. In 2007, a majority of outside scientific expert advisors to the CDC were found to have potential violations of the agency’s conflict of interest regulations (www.tinyurl.com/24u4jen).
6. Side effects are slight. To the extent that there are any side effects from vaccines, aren’t they are mild, such as soreness at the site of vaccination and short-term fever?
Response: All vaccines can result in injury or death; legally, they are “unavoidably unsafe” products. This is the reason that Congress created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program—because it recognized that vaccines injure and cause death in some individuals. Although screening mechanisms and risk factors could be identified to protect those at risk, they do not exist today. Leading voices, such as Dr. Bernadine Healy, former head of the National Institutes of Health (www.tinyurl.com/59wns7) have called for studies of those who may have been vaccine-injured. Nonetheless, all fifty U.S. states impose “one-size-fits-all” vaccination mandates as a requirement for day care and school admission, regardless of family medical history and infant weight.
7. The book is closed. Every major study looking for connections between vaccines and autism has failed to find any link. Isn’t this book closed?
Response: Dr. Robert Chen, Chief of Vaccine Safety and Development at the CDC, said in 1995, “the only line item for vaccine safety research is I think on the order of a little less than $2 million per year. That basically covers operation of VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System) period, and nothing else.” (Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines (ACCV) and National Vaccine Advisory Committee (NVAC) Subcommittees on Vaccine Safety, May 31, 1995.) More recently, Dr. Louis Cooper, vaccine inventor and former President of the American Academy of Pediatrics admitted that the vaccine safety science research budget was twenty million dollars or a mere 0.5 percent of the four billion dollar total vaccine budget for purchase, promotion, and delivery in 2008. (www.pediatrics.org/cgi/content/full/122/1/149). This is especially significant if you consider the dramatic rise in autism incidence in the past two decades, from four to five in 10,000 in the early 1990s, to one in 110 today.
The studies that the U.S. government uses to disprove causation of harm are limited and flawed (see www.fourteenstudies.org). Several rigorous studies have found links between vaccines, developmental disability, and chronic illness. These include the Gallagher-Goodman Stony Brook University Medical Center study tying hepatitis B triple series vaccine and developmental disability (www.tinyurl.com/2ejdrd8) and the University of Manitoba study funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research that found an association between delayed diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus vaccination and a reduced risk of childhood asthma (www.tinyurl.com/2edrl7c). There have been few studies on children with regressive autism. The 2004 Institute of Medicine Report did not rule out the possible existence of a vulnerable subset of children in whom vaccines could cause autism. And, in late 2009, the government spokesman on autism, Dr. Thomas Insel, acknowledged that the real rise in autism prevalence must be attributed at least in part to environmental causes.
8. Thimerosal is no smoking gun. Isn’t it true that we know that vaccines don’t cause autism because thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative, has been removed from all pediatric vaccines and autism rates have continued to rise?
Response: It is misleading to assume a direct and causal relationship between those two facts; the inference fails to account for confounding factors. In other words, there were other potentially significant events occurring at the same time that must be considered. For example, as we decreased the amount of thimerosal in pediatric vaccines, we increased the total number of vaccines as well as the cumulative exposure to other neurotoxic ingredients, including aluminum. It is not possible to ascertain whether vaccines are causing the dramatic increase in autism incidence until we dedicate the funds to pursue a long-term controlled study. Furthermore, thimerosal remains in some childhood vaccines today. Flu shots are recommended for all children and most seasonal flu shots, including those routinely given to children and pregnant women, contain ten to twenty-five micrograms of thimerosal or approximately 10,000 to 25,000 parts per billion (ppb). Thimerosal is nearly fifty percent ethylmercury by weight (www.tinyurl.com/y7pdm5m) and continues to be used in the manufacturing process of many vaccines. After filtration, vaccines still have “trace” amounts of thimerosal equivalent to 0.5 microgram or 2,000 ppb. Two hundred ppb meets the EPA classification for hazardous waste and two ppb is the EPA’s limit for safe drinking water (www.tinyurl.com/y2zfe58). Mercury is the most neurotoxic nonradioactive substance on the planet. It has been removed from over-the-counter medicines and veterinary vaccines. It should not be injected in any amount into humans of any age.
9. Pediatricians are knowledgeable. Pediatricians are well-educated about the risks and benefits of vaccines. Can’t they tell if a vaccine is contraindicated for a particular child?
Response: The full ramifications of the vaccination schedule are unknown because researchers have not studied vaccines cumulatively in the way that they are administered. Pediatricians and family practice doctors receive little education about the possible adverse consequences that can occur after the administration of vaccines. The information they do receive is typically limited to a description of the vaccines on the CDC schedule, how to administer them, the importance of full compliance, and how to catch children up who have missed doses. State departments of health apply pressure on physicians who write “too many” medical exemptions. Many doctors are not eager to discuss vaccination decisions with parents and rarely inform them of their rights and the legal exemptions available to them. Pediatricians are even supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics in their decision to discharge parents who are not willing to vaccinate their children according to CDC-recommended vaccination schedules (www.tinyurl.com/4mdze2).
“Vaccination Compulsion is Ethical”
10. Public health trumps individual choice. If you don’t vaccinate yourself and your children, aren’t you endangering others?
Response: If you have been vaccinated against an infectious disease and your blood antibody titers indicate that you have levels providing specific immunity, you cannot contract that disease from someone, whether that person was vaccinated or not. People who are unvaccinated, and those who are vaccinated but whose immunity has worn off, can be disease carriers if they do not stay at home when they are sick. In the event of an infectious disease outbreak, schools require that unvaccinated students remain at home. Due to viral shedding from live virus vaccines, a recently vaccinated person can infect the unvaccinated and those who are vaccinated but whose immunity has worn off. Vaccine package inserts do not rule out the possibility of disease transmission via viral shedding and close personal contact (www.tinyurl.com/24ldtn).
Admittedly, some people are unable to be vaccinated due to age or health status. There have been vitriolic discussions about the selfishness of parents who do not vaccinate their children. In the absence of a true public health emergency, the morality of requiring someone to vaccinate to protect others must be carefully weighed against the morality of mandating a medical intervention for healthy individuals that is known to injure and cause death to some. The government has committed or paid out over two billion dollars to about 2,500 families to compensate for vaccine injury and death. A society that protects fundamental human rights does not discriminate on the basis of genetic predisposition or mandate a practice that inevitably causes injury and death, regardless of the number of victims. This is especially true when the scientific foundation supporting long-term safety and efficacy is unknown due to government failure to provide rigorous unbiased science on vaccine safety. The decision to be vaccinated should rest with the individual or the parent, not the state.
11. Mandatory vaccination is legal: Aren’t vaccination laws constitutional and for the public good?
Response: Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a 1905 U.S. Supreme Court case, established the precedent that states may impose vaccination mandates during public health emergencies. This decision, arising from a deadly smallpox epidemic in a different era, predates the doctrines of free and informed consent and medical autonomy and most of the scientific advances of the twentieth century. State-mandated vaccination during a smallpox epidemic in 1905 reflects a radically different reality than ours today. In 1905, there was a single vaccination mandate at issue during a widespread and contagious smallpox epidemic, and Jacobson’s noncompliance resulted in a monetary fine. At no point was Jacobson denied employment, or his child denied school admission, due to the failure to vaccinate. Jacobson and his son did not face mandates with up to seventy doses of sixteen vaccines that included foreign proteins and neurotoxic chemicals. And even Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which upheld state mandates, noted the risks of “regulations so arbitrary and oppressive” that they would be “cruel and inhuman in the last degree.” Jacobson also provided for the medical exemption to mandatory vaccination which is upheld in all fifty states. Current vaccination mandates, required in non-emergency situations, based on inadequate science, rest on a questionable constitutional foundation.
12. Justified liability protection. Congress rightly limited the liability of doctors and vaccine manufacturers in 1986 to safeguard the nation’s vaccine supply. Don’t we need insulation of doctors and industry from liability to protect the vaccine supply?
Response: In 1986, Congress granted tort liability protection to doctors and the vaccine industry against vaccine injuries and death. This means that people harmed by vaccines cannot sue vaccine manufacturers or the physicians who administered the vaccines. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth that families of the vaccine-injured do not have the right to sue for a defective product design claim in civil court before a jury. Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that the majority’s decision leaves a regulatory vacuum in which no one—no federal agency, no jury—ensures that vaccine manufacturers incorporate scientific and technological advancements. There is no incentive for corporations to improve the design of products that are already generating significant profits. Blanket liability protection and the lack of free and informed consent, have led to the large increase in compulsory childhood vaccination mandates. A responsible universal vaccination program must include rigorous, impartial science on vaccine safety, free and informed consent of individuals to vaccination, and corporate accountability for vaccines. We must change the laws that underpin today’s childhood mass vaccination program to create real choice and real accountability.
13. Schools as the gatekeeper: It makes sense to have schools police kids’ vaccination status. Shouldn’t schools require immunization?
Response: Education is a fundamental right for children to receive and a responsibility for parents to provide. The right to education should not be contingent on vaccination status. It is profoundly unwise to turn schools into vaccination police. In the event of infectious disease outbreaks, unvaccinated children may be required to stay at home. This does not interfere with their general right to participate in school.
“Vaccines Promise Ever-Increasing Benefits”
14. Unlimited benefits: There appear to be no limits to the diseases we can conquer through vaccines. Scientists are working on vaccines for cancer and HIV. Isn’t this welcome?
Response: As is the case with all medical interventions, people should have the right to free and informed consent for vaccination. This means there should be complete disclosure regarding the risks and benefits and all vaccines must be rigorously studied for safety and effectiveness before use. For a variety of reasons, including family history, prior disease exposure, and a varying assessment of the dangers and likelihood of contracting the disease, all people will not make the same decisions about the risk-reward tradeoffs. Individuals must make those choices, not government officials or scientists.
15. More is better: Aren’t relatively new compulsory vaccines, such as vaccines for flu, hepatitis B, and HPV, welcome because they protect us from deadly diseases?
Response: The legal justification for compulsory vaccination is to protect people in the event of contagious, widespread infectious disease epidemics or true public health emergencies. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1905 decision, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, created this precedent during a smallpox outbreak. Citizens have the right today to obtain exemption from vaccination for medical, religious and philosophical reasons, depending on the state. The scope of vaccination mandates must be proportionate to the public health emergency. While there are no epidemics of hepatitis B in the United States, for example, this vaccine for a sexually-transmitted disease is compulsory for babies and children in forty-seven states, based on the premise that government may impose vaccines for the “greater good.” More vaccination mandates are not necessarily better, and state requirements must respect fundamental human rights.