So in California come July 1st, there will no vaccine exemptions based on personal belief. However, there still will be a medical exemption, such as it is.
My understanding is that pediatrics/public health recognizes some contraindications for specific vaccines, but very, very few (if any) contraindications for not giving a child any vaccine anytime. I’ve heard that at least one prominent CAM healthcare attorney is advising his California CAM physician clients not to write medical exemption letters for parents who have a fear of or personal belief against vaccination. That might be prudent advice, and certainly no lawyer will get into trouble for giving it. Obviously, this is all very bad news for anti-vaxers.
You are not going to like this, but…
I will probably weigh-in on what I think are the medically supported justifications for the exemption another time and another forum. For now, I’d like to talk to my anti-vaxer friends and colleagues, including those who for tactical/PR reasons characterize their views as in support of “informed consent” about the “dangers of vaccination”. You’re not going to like it, but to paraphrase Ziggy Martin in “Drive,” who’s gonna tell you when you’re too late and aren’t so great In terms of where we are and the constitutional arguments being tossed around, well, you’re too late, wrong, and less lyrically, the imprecise hyperbolic language is not helping you focus on what may be realistically achievable.
First, the inaccurate hyperbole: California anti-vaxers claim that their kids and child care professionals are being forced by the government to be vaccinated. Not true. I’m from Texas, and in Texas we know what forced vaccination looks like. A couple years ago, the Texas legislature tried to force all young girls to get the HPV vaccine. The measure ultimately failed because of the public outcry against forced vaccination. California is not forcing anyone to get vaccinated. Rather, it imposes consequences (albeit draconian) for the unvaccinated; for kids, no public or private school; for adults, you can’t teach kids or be a child caregiver. That’s a big difference constitutionally and legally in general. But in addition, by mis-framing the issue, you may be missing some realistic partial, medium-term solutions, as I’ll explain in a moment.
The lawsuit…
A lawsuit has been filed challenging the law eliminating the personal exemption. However, this lawsuit will be dismissed. Vaccination has already been upheld in California, twice before if I’m not mistaken, and the law is well within the government’s police power to protect the general health and welfare, such as it is thought to be (and I’ll get back to that also).
The new argument floating around is that the law violates anti-vaxers’ and their children’s state constitutional right to education. The courts will reject this argument. What most people don’t realize about constitutional rights is that they are not absolute, especially when they have to be weighed against competing rights and interests. And that would apply to even the most fundamental rights. Take the rights to life and liberty, which are as core as it gets. These rights don’t prevent the government from incarcerating or even executing criminals, and the rights don’t stop the government from drafting soldiers in times of war.
We all have First Amendment rights, but they don’t extend to shouting fire in a theater (unless of course there is a fire in the theater.) The most recent high visibility case involving weighing competing rights is that idiot Alabama clerk who refused to sign marriage licenses for gay couples because it supposedly interfered with her First Amendment rights of freedom of religion. Apart from the fact her position violated the basic constitutional premise of separation of church and state, whatever individual freedom of religion right she has does not allow her to violate the equal protection rights of gay couples. The court had no difficulty subordinating her individual religious beliefs/rights to the equal protection rights of the many.
(And to anticipate, the courts will hold that the law does not violate the equal protection rights of the anti-vaxers. To make a long story short, because this is a matter of public health and because anti-vaxers are not a federally “protected class” like race, gender, and now sexual preference, the courts will apply what’s called a rational relationship test in adjudging an equal protection claim against the law. This is the kiss-of-death to a constitutional challenge. Under a rational relationship test, the state only has to show or hypothesize that there is some possible, arguable, theoretical, potential rational basis to the law, and the courts bend-over backwards to find that a law has a rational basis.)
Competing Rights?
But getting back to the weighing of competing rights, it comes-up all the time in criminal cases. First Amendment freedom of press rights and the right of the public to know versus the due process rights of the accused. The privacy of a witness versus the sixth amendment’s confrontation clause right which requires that a defendant be given an opportunity to confront his/her accusers. In short, it is very common for judges to weigh competing rights and interests.
The California right to education is just of one of many rights and interests which the state grants and protects. Sorry, but the reality is that an overwhelming majority of legislators and California parents believe that the current vaccination program is necessary to protect the health of children, and that allowing parents not to vaccinate their children because of personal beliefs and having unvaccinated kids in public and private schools makes their children less safe.
There is no doubt in my mind that the new law is a valid exercise of that power, even though it affects the anti- vaxers’ education rights under the California constitution. In the current and whatever future case there is on this issue, the courts will hold that the education rights of the anti-vaxers are subordinate to the public health and safety of the majority.
The anti-vaxer comeback is that the majority is wrong and it’s all a conspiracy between government and big pharma; that vaccines have never been proven to be effective, don’t confer any public health benefit, or the benefit is outweighed by the risk and dangers of vaccines, that the diseases they are alleged to prevent are not as deadly as the harm vaccinations cause, and all the rest.
I confess to not knowing who is right; the majority or the anti-vaxers. But in terms of public policy and direct legal challenges, it doesn’t matter. That’s right, it doesn’t matter whether vaccination in the future is determined to be more dangerous than beneficial. The only thing that matters right now in terms of a direct legal challenge is that there is a consensus of scientific opinion that vaccination programs are safe and highly effective, at least a consensus of conventional medicine, which, by the way, is in practicality, the same thing.
So what to do?
The first and obvious thing to do is try to change the consensus. That’s a hard process and change takes time, but it does happen, if the science supports the change. Thanks to people like Gary Taubes, David Perlmutter, Nina Teicholz, and others, the low fat, high carb diet world view is on the way out. To that end, the new anti-vax documentary by Wakefield is a very good start. However, someone with mainstream credibility is going to have to take it to the next step. For reasons which I don’t think are justified and ironic to the extreme, Wakefield is viewed as the poster-boy for scientific fraud by the mainstream. (The irony comes from the fact that the main accusation against him is undisclosed conflict of interest because his research was funded by an interested plaintiffs’ law firm. There is a whole literature on how Pharma has bought and paid for scientific research, and I’d bet that the biggest Wakefield medical detractors do the same thing he did, just on a much bigger scale.)
So more public broadcast and film attention is a must. But there is more, like the substance, technical part. Pretty much everything I’ve read coming from the anti-vaxers is overly emotional and not well-reasoned. It’s a big, complicated, multi-factored, nuanced problem. I think there needs to be sophisticated comprehensive analysis by people who have more than just an MD or PhD after their names. I’d like to see a panel of experts with actual experience in pediatrics, immunology, epidemiology, public health, biostatisticians, methodology, medical epistemology and heuristics get together and figure this out, do a meta-analysis what supports vaccination and put together a product which could stand-up to the mainstream and its talking heads. That kind of endeavor would take some serious funding, and you anti-vaxers are a fragmented community, so there would be financial challenges.
Circling Back…
Now let’s circle back to legal, mindful of why a direct constitutional challenge won’t work, and what to do about it. As stated, the problem is the competing and superior interests of the majority’s rights. So how do we get around that? Take the majority out of the equation and maybe find a better constitutional vehicle. Right now, your only option is individual home school. I contend that anti-vaxers have a right to associate with other anti-vaxers and so do their kids, and that right to associate extends to education. Right now, the law essentially outlaws group home schooling; i.e., a private schools of similarly minded folks. I believe that law might be subject to a constitutional challenge under the first amendment freedom to associate. This would require a test case of a group, private, home school. Once it hits the radar screen, the state would likely order its closure. That would give the school and the parents standing.
Let’s assume by the time the case goes through discovery, the blue ribbon panel of actual experts with unassailable credentials finds that vaccination…. whatever it finds that’s supportive of the anti vaxer position (assuming that such is the conclusion). I think those opinions and experts have a place in the case. Now we have a trial the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Scopes monkey trial, and wouldn’t that be pretty nifty.
Of course, that doesn’t get the anti-vaxer kids as a group back in regular schools. Instead, they are segregated. Some anti-vaxers might think this solution makes them modern day lepers. Maybe it does, but vaccination decisions have consequences, eventually, and in California eventually is now.
Some committed anti-vaxers might find a doc willing to take the chance and write the medical exemption based on some medical pretext, but that’s a temporary, short term solution. Once the schools start seeing the same names show-up on these exemptions, they’ll notify the medical board which will take action and possibly quick action like summary suspension if there is a systematic effort to undermine public health (according to the board’s world view). So there needs to be realistic and meaningful solutions which accommodate anti-vaxers’ beliefs, but recognize the state of consensus medical knowledge, as hard as that might be for some of my friends to swallow, at least until the world view changes.
I’m just saying.
Richard Jaffe, Esq.
rickjaffeesquire@gmail.com
Excellent article, sir. My only exception would be your implication that Andy Wakefield’s research – regarding the paper published in, then retracted from, the Lancet, specifically – was funded by the referenced law firm, which to my knowledge is false.
Last summer on my weekly vaccine show I interviewed the director of a national, online school, which was presented as a viable home school option to vaccine requirement, in California; followed by several weeks of interviews with homeschooling moms, and how each dealt with her particular economic, marital and job status.
LOGIC 101 — IF the vaccines are *effective* as claimed by the medical monopoly you designate as court-sanctified, THEN the vaccinated kids are safe from the dreaded disease appearing in others……… So it is illogical for the courts to swallow the idea that the unvaccinated are a public health threat to the vaccinated.
Since you say the courts in CA will swallow it anyway, then clearly the Courts are useless as judging facts and logic. New courts are needed longer term.
And that Logic 101 is not hyperbole and emotionalism. Do the numbers.
Vaccinations are NOT a one size fits all, putting so many in one dose – and then there is a reaction, what did the child react to? How do you narrow down ? When it occurs – you are too late, and the damage is done. Punctuates and lesions on the brain, Tcell problems… , and because it happens as a result of a vaccine, your told to seek a psychologist for asking questions. Then when you are up in arms, because you don’t want a repeat of the reaction in your next child – you are hounded and told no vaccination, no school. You ask for written testimony and guarantees, that something won’t cause a problem, that your child will be ok – but that is denied. You ask for a vaccine insert, ingredient list and a full list of possible reactions, and your met with blank stares. I think it’s becoming too prevalent to throw so much into a health immune system and expect it to be ok. Who will step up and help the families when there is a reaction? NOBODY.
OK, but why can’t the kids “attend” an on-line charter school paid for by the government?
I don’t have much understanding of US law, bear with me:
Presumably it won’t be long before Ca authorities turn up to take kids who aren’t in standard school and arrest the parents for child endangerment on one or other pretext, then take the kids into care, possibly as wards of state (or whatever you have in US), and vaccinate them anyway. So it isn’t even assault.
Parents will need to be well-prepared for that scenario, I reckon. I wonder what can be done?
Not to mention http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2201985/
But how can medical professionals know that vaccines are safe when they do not know all the ingredients? Such as if peanut oil is an ingredient?
http://www.drugs.com/inactive/
Inactive Ingredients
Inactive ingredients are components of a drug product that do not increase or affect the therapeutic action of the active ingredient, which is usually the active drug. Inactive ingredients are added during the manufacturing process of pharmaceutical products such as tablets, capsules, suppositories, and injections. Inactive ingredients may also be referred to as inert ingredients or excipients, and generally have no pharmacological effect. Examples of inactive ingredients include binding materials (which may be excipients), dyes, preservatives, and flavoring agents. Agents that combine with active ingredients to facilitate drug transport in the body are also considered inactive.
The FDA approves inactive ingredients that are included in pharmaceutical products. However, not all inactive ingredients are always inactive. Alcohol is one example of an ingredient that may be active or inactive based on the specific formulation of the medication. Patients may have allergic reactions or other adverse effects to inactive ingredients. If a patient has a known allergic reaction to an inactive ingredient, they should check for the ingredient in new prescription or over-the-counter medications or check with their pharmacist. Examples of inactive ingredients that are have been reported to cause reactions in some patients include: sulfites, benzoates, aspartame, saccharin, oleic acid, benzyl alcohol, lactose, soya lecithin, propylene glycol, and sorbitan trioleate. Patients who have allergic or adverse reactions to certain inactive ingredients may be able to use products that are color- or preservative-free.
http://ipecamericas.org/about/faqs#question7
7. How are excipients “approved” for use in pharmaceutical products?
Under U.S. law, an excipient, unlike an active drug substance, has no regulatory status and may not be sold for use in food or approved drugs unless it can be qualified through one or more of the three U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval mechanisms that are available for components used in food and/or finished new drug dosage forms.
These mechanisms are:
1. determination by FDA that the substance is “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) pursuant to Title 21, U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Parts 182, 184 or 186 (21 CFR 182, 184 & 186);
The FDA needs to improve its oversight of GRAS (generally recognized as safe) food ingredients, claims a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) no longer ‘approves’ food ingredients as GRAS, but does review their safety if a company submits a research dossier including the findings of an independent scientific panel. Following review, the FDA can issue a letter of no objection, leading to what is commonly referred to as FDA GRAS. However, the company remains responsible for ensuring the ingredient is safe and that it complies with all regulatory requirements. Alternatively, a company can self-affirm GRAS after conducting all necessary research and forming an independent panel to determine its safety. To self-affirm, the company needs to be confident that it could defend the safety of its ingredient based on this process.
Self-affirmed ingredients are not submitted to the FDA. They do not appear on the package insert. They become a protected trade secret, protected by international law. So the doctor, pharmacist, and FDA have no idea if peanut oil in an ingredient in a pharmaceutical product.
This is a list of the oils that I have found listed as an ingredient in vaccine adjuvants: almond oil, animal oils, apricot oil, avocado oil, babassu oil, black currant seed oil, borage oil, canola oil, castor oil, castor oil hydrogenated, chicken fat oil, coconut oil, cod liver oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, cottonseed oil hydrogenated, cottonseed oil partially hydrogenated, emu oil, evening primrose oil, fish oils, flax seed oil, grapeseed oil, groundnut oil, hazelnut oil, jojoba oil, lard oil, linseed oil, lupin oil, Menhaden oil, mineral oil, mink oil, mustard seed oil, oat oil, olive oil, orange roughy oil, palm kernel oil, palm oil, palm oil hydrogenated, peanut oil, rapeseed oil, rice oil, rye oil, safflower oil, sesame oil, shark liver oil, soybean oil, soybean oil partially hydrogenated, squalane, sunflower oil, teff oil, terpene oils [derived from pine trees (turpentine) and oil contained in the peels of citrus fruits (orange oil)], triticale oil, walnut oil, wheat germ oil. [49] [50] [51] [52] These oils can be mixed in any combination.
Hey Dick ~
I know you’re a legal expert and all that legaleze is impressive, but I have two problems with your proposal … First of all, stop labeling responsible and educated parents “anti-vaxers”. It’s offensive and paints them in a box that will never be positive. These are thoughtful, caring, protective parents that deserve respect. How would you like it if we labeled all defense lawyers as anti-justice?
Secondly, since when has anything science based been decided on consensus… Ever?!
Science is based on truth. Evidence based and reproducible truths. That is the argument… And until wimps like you decide to challenge the prevailing consensus (based on popular opinion and agenda) then children and adults will continue to be subjected to the most unscientific experiment of our lifetime.
Grow some balls and figure out how to help these people.
Dr. Marc VanHoogstraat
You are missing an important component and all the math in your emotional hyperbole. Some children really cannot be vaccinated and no vaccine is 100% effect. The courts are not going to buy what you are selling because it is con.
All well and good. I can follow Richard’s arguments and, regrettably must agree with him. Although the law is very different in the UK and Germany, the same result would ensue because the burden of proof which is the core issue here is not challenged in the court.
What you need to do is to raise CRIMINAL charges against any state employee personally who attempts to blackmail parents into injecting foreign matter with largely unkown (and unknowable) contents with a threat of depriving that child of a reasonable education. The charge must contain “action likely to cause grevious bodily harm”. This gets the core argument about the efficacy and dangers of so called “vaccination” into court and a generally accepted belief cannot be considered as evidence.
The accusers must show that there are good grounds for believing that their child might be seriously harmed (not a difficult thing to do). The defendents must then prove that vaccines are so effective that, for the sake of public well-being, a certain amount of serious injury is something that the body public must accept for their safety. As even the theory upon which vaccination is based is, scientifically speaking, total bunkum they are going to find a defence extremely difficult.
As each official attempting to apply this blackmail can have hundreds of such charges filed against him/her and, as a result many thousands of cases to hear all of which must present the scientific evidence against vaccination in such a way that the officials may well have their eyes opened then officialdom itself may cease to actively promote the interest of the pharma lobby.
Some decades ago in the UK, the fluoridation of drinking water was stopped in the same way.
Blessed be
Karma
“The California right to education is just of one of many rights and interests which the state grants and protects.” I believe the founders said that constitutional rights ARE absolute. They said that rights are “endowed by the creator” not “granted and protected” by the state as you have said. I believe the founders would say that today’s courts (governments) are corrupt to the core. I also believe that the founders would have exercised the prescribed remedy of removing said governments long ago. Once you go down the road of giving the state the power to grant rights…you don’t have a republic…you have tyranny. Somewhere in recent history, the people have been made to forget that they are the masters and government subordinate. Unfortunately, you are correct in that this is the way it is.
I also believe that there will come a time when a critical mass of the people will be jogged out of their collective amnesia and move to regain their place as creators of governments and not it’s slaves.
To paraphrase MLK, “The arc of history is long…but it bends toward justice.”
Just want to add a few things. First, as was mentioned by another many of us are NOT “anti-Vaccine” and I am not sure that term is the best to describe us. Really I think we should stress what we want are SAFER vaccines. 3 billion paid out by the vaccine court to a tiny fraction of those who ever get to have their cases heard should show *evidence* that these vaccines need ALOT of improvement and the damages being caused by faulty ingredients/processes are NOT acceptable.
I might welcome a well designed effective and safe vaccine and I think the push should be toward this and those of us who push for this should be described with a name that reveals this. In fact I see no need for “injections” at all with all of their toxic additives and many vaccines could be made to take by methods such as simple exposure/inhalation etc.
Also, as much of the vaccine damage appears to be caused in part by the aluminum/mercury etc. adjuvants, and these metals can be proven to cause damage and bioaccumulate in organisms despite the source. I would think this might be a place to make a stand that nobody should be coerced to inject these KNOWN and proven toxins.
One last thing, maybe parents really should start pulling their children out of the school system in large numbers and see how well the control freaks like that. What really needs to be done IMo as I have suggested before is that an adequate number of mass balance animal (rat/mouse) studies need to be performed using Thimerosal/aluminum adjuvants and we need to know exactly how long it takes (if ever) to excrete these poisons. This may sound preposterous but several GLP studies done in a low cost country (that doesn’t have as much corrupted/owned regulators) could go a long way to answer questions. The design would be to tag the metal adjuvants with 14C, inject them into the test groups (with adequte control animals) and analyze (collect periodic blood, urine, feces etc. samples to see if all of the tagged material is recovered and accounted for and exactly how long it takes to rid itself from the body. (my guess is that much of this may bind and NEVER be excreted). These tests are done all of time in the pharmaceutical industry, vaccines seem to get a ‘free ride’ (my work is in a private contract lab and this is what we do) they are not terribly expensive and I think might be the PROOF many are looking for to conclusively show the danger of metal adjuvants coupled with carriers that carry this stuff to the brain and other organs where it may remain for life. Some food for thought I hope.
Thank you so much for this well written article; this was sorely needed (and needs to be understood) in our community.
I hope some of our bigger movers and shakers within the ‘choice’ movement will read your commentary.
safer vaccines, for sure. working on a follow up blog to address some of the above and other comments I got.
Kids with hepB are allowed to go to school. Kids not vaccinated against it aren’t. Where is the logic in that?
The bottom line is vaccination is a medical procedure. Currently full transparency is not being given to patients or our representatives as to the potential risks as stated on the inserts of the vaccines. The moment risk is implied and you are coerced into receiving a vaccine, even though implied risks exists, all forms of medical ethics, patient disclosure, Nuremberg, and informed consent have been violated. This is what the basis of this law does and therefor creates liability to the state if injury occurs. There is no longer freedom of choice regarding your personal health for you or your child, this is a manipulation and threat that violates the very law that guarantees an education. The two are different issues and one should not be used as a way to manipulate someone to do a medical procedure on oneself or ones child as this is manipulated consent. Also, with the types of required vaccines, tetanus for example is not a infectious disease, so how is it that this can even be placed on the required list being that it is not a threat to others at the school should you not be vaccinated. Finally, the basis of creating this law is flawed to begin with, evidence being the most recent outbreak of mumps at Harvard where every student had been vaccinated or the fact the 55 percent of the Disney Measles outbreak were vaccinated. By those standards vaccination is no guarantee of immunity or inability to transmit the very diseases that one is being vaccinated against. This law is mandating a flawed science or again, a virus that is not infectious. By nature of this, the law can be challenged as to the merits of what it is attempting to guarantee and that is immunity for the vaccinated which obviously is not and can’t be guaranteed.
Your concept of calling experts together is a good one. Would be nice for the public to be part of such discussion. I notice that your list of experts omits some of the most important, This, in fact, explains some of your misconceptions about the topic at hand. You have omitted the mercury and aluminum toxicologists. I can tell you- They will have some interesting things to say about what THEY think about injecting two toxic elements into human bodies- Elements that are NOT on the biologic periodic table. Dont think mercury is still injected into children? Sorry- think again- Just last year the California governor gave his signature that allowed mercury flu vaccines to be given to children in that year. Or why dont you try googling on aluminum toxicity- Hmm pretty interesting- lots of references to the word “cancer” So parents should not object to that being injected into their kids? Nothing in the constitution to support them? Sorry for my tone- Actually I appreciate your article in many ways, but please understand- There is a lot of anger in the community of people who have seen children’s lives destroyed – often along with the lives of other members of the family.
This is a very informative article by attorney Richard Jaffee. However I sure hope he is wrong about the law not meeting any criteria for being unconstitutional. In the mean time I want to question him about why he thinks that physicians will lose their licenses for writing medical exemptions. He may be right, but it goes against the way SB277 was written and interpreted by Governor Brown and many in the State Senate and Assembly, who voted for this bill being assured that physicians would not lose their licenses, or be reprimanded for writing medical exemptions:
Once the schools start seeing the same names show-up on these exemptions, they’ll notify the medical board which will take action and possibly quick action like summary suspension if there is a systematic effort to undermine public health (according to the board’s world view).
See this recent link discussing Santa Barbara County Public Health Department’s letter to School Superintendents suggesting re-educating of physicians writing this type of exemption. I do not know how this action on the part of the local PHD will come out, but many people are very upset that it goes against the way SB 277 was “sold” to the State officials and the Governor. See: http://vaxtruth.org/2016/06/charity-dean-sb277/
Governor Brown says “medical doctors have the legal right to exercise their clinical expertise to determine what is best for their patients.” There is also a short video of the Senators, Assembly Members questioning Dr. Richard Pan and Mr. Ben Allen about this issue of freedom of physicians to use their best clinical judgment in writing medical exemptions without fear of punishment or loss of license. (That video is near the bottom of the page at the same link.) Ben Allen says a child with a genetic predisposition, or immunological problem, can go to a doctor anywhere in the state and get an exemption. (starting at about 22 sec.) The next Assembly Member on the video is Rob Bonta asking for an amendment to SB277 saying that the physician has complete professional discretion over writing a medical exemption. This is at about 43 sec.
But even in this video the issue is not totally clear and the rest of video shows the difficulties physicians may encounter. So it will probably require a court case to determine just how free physicians will be in writing exemptions to vaccinations on medical grounds. This brings up a similar situation that the 9th Circuit Court ruled on in Conant v McCaffrey (2002), which was about physicians writing medical recommendations for the use of cannabis.
http://www.canorml.org/prop/MDGuide.html Soon after the passage of Proposition 215, the federal government made several announcements in reaction to the new law. The gist of the government’s policy was that any physician recommending or approving the medicinal use of cannabis would be subject to three possible sanctions:
1) Criminal prosecution for aiding and abetting or conspiring with a patient to assist in the acquisition of marijuana;
2) Revocation of a physician’s DEA registration to prescribe scheduled drugs;
3) Exclusion from the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conant_v._McCaffrey : “Again the doctors and patients won and the federal government lost, while Judge Alex Kozinski’s concurrence also brought in the First Amendment right of patients to hear accurate information from their doctors, and the state of California’s right to make its own laws without being subverted by federal commandeering. The ruling set a precedent protecting doctors, patients, and state medical marijuana programs in the ten states of the Ninth Circuit.”
We can hope that doctors will be able to practice medicine using their professional judgment, while doing what is best for their patients. With the Governor’s signing statement in mind, the amendment to SB 277 regarding medical exemptions, which also clearly allows for Family History as a factor for the physician writing a medical exemption, we trust that physicians will not be disciplined for something clearly allowed by this law. If a court case is required, I would hope that the Conant v McCaffrey decision may have set precedent in this case also, and doctors will be able to practice medicine using their best clinical judgment to determine what is best for a patient.
To Kabler, Nice ideas for scientific research, but after watching autism and its junk science for 16 years, I can tell you what will happen if anyone manages to do said research- Public health authorities will simply ignore it/ dismiss it on a variety of pretexts. It will vanish into thin air. Do not imagine for one minute that there are public health/senior medical people who actually want to know what causes autism. Or should I say, they dont want YOU to know what causes autism.
Sorry it takes so long for new comments to appear. I approve new ones since the skeptics tried an invasion – and we are in Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks – so internet is few and far between.
I disagree that vaccination is still a choice. If a parent cant afford to quit their job to homeschool their child, then there is no choice. In Australia, courts have long held that consent under duress is not valid consent.
I would respectfully request that you not use the term “anti-vaxxer.” It is a pejorative, deliberately used to polarize and demean.
If I harshly criticize Toyota for how they handled their problem with stuck accelerators several years ago, that does not make me “anti-accelerator,” “anti-car,” or even “anti-Toyota.” In fact, I think Toyotas are terrific automobiles. But the way the corporation handled the issue–denying there was a problem, holding up their own studies showing no problem, then trying to blame it on the drivers (“they must have confused the brake and accelerator pedals,”)m then finally admitting that there was, indeed, a serious problem and issuing a recall–is nearly identical to the problem we see with vaccine manufacturers.
Only vaccine manufacturers aren’t admitting there’s a problem.
One other detail: there is not, in fact, a consensus on vaccine safety.
That assertion originated from the vaccine manufacturers, was repeated–loudly and often–by doctors and researchers who were actually paid consultants to the manufacturers, and eventually repeated by well-meaning and caring doctors and researchers who believe it because they’ve heard it so often.
It’s simply not true.
There are literally over 100 independent studies linking vaccines and/or their ingredients to autoimmune, neurological, developmental, intestinal, and other serious harms.
You can start here: http://www.activistpost.com/2011/09/100-compiled-studies-on-vaccine-dangers.html.
You can also search VAERS for the nearly 70,000 reports of serious adverse events associated with vaccine or vaccines given. Understand that “serious” means things like seizures, stroke, paralysis, severe autoimmune reaction, severe allergic reaction, neurological damage, etc.
And finally, please read the package inserts for vaccines. EVERY SINGLE ONE includes this sentence:
“______ [this vaccine] has not been assessed for carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, or impairment of fertility.”
This is in spite of the fact that vaccines DO contain ingredients recognized as carcinogenic, mutagenic, and adversely affecting fertility.
In addition to all the above comments related to the legal angles that could be taken on basis of the proof we have that vaccines are unsafe, why is it that we can’t use the CDC’s own study on the MMR vaccine that found a tangible, and disturbing, connection between the MMR vaccine and autism to sue the State of California for forcing parents to follow a vaccine regime that is known to damage children? Seems to me the legal angle we should be taking is to attack the CDC vaccine schedule and the vaccines themselves with the studies and evidence that prove harm.
A valid legal argument by attorney Jaffe. Not an analysis of anything further because his bio reads like someone without science training who is paid to shill. All hat and no cattle.
That said, it is unsurprisng that so many facts get in the way of his analysis that the result is a trope of delusion- but that is standard fare for the side of the argument he supports.
We could, of course, send him numerous (100s) of peer-reviewed articles and literally hundreds of thousands of pages of testimonials which contradict his so-called facts which clearly evidence that something is very wrong with the present vaccine protocol.
Even the so-called facts by those responsible for the supervision of the vaccine program are rife with inaccuracy, misinformation and outright fraud. If we have to lay this out for him he is clearly misinformed- or simply well paid.
Pursuant to the 1986 act, HHS was to provide yearly reports on safety an efficacy as a quid pro quo. The fact that they did none, should abrogate the legislation in the first instance.
The number of children maimed, murdered and otherwise compromised by the way-too-aggressive vaccine protocol has reached epidemic proportions.
Ratcheting the program back, conducting actual testing (not done by Big Pharma or compromised government agencies) would be a good start.
Then go from there.
In the interim, we will all continue to fight about something that is rather common sense- that medical procedures which can cause harm should not be forced and that informed consent is the only lawful approach to this madness.
The alternative will be acts of self defense and the remonstrations that occur as a consequence.
Better still, force Jaffe to get the flu jab. That might focus his attention (until the thimerosal kicks in).
He probably hasn’t read the following articles, nor would he care.
http://tinyurl.com/yb2lk23c
http://tinyurl.com/y3h87khp
There are literally thousands more.
Sometimes you just can’t reason with stupid- no matter how legalistic the argument. Or perhaps you can’t reason with the person with the large mortgage who is paid to state the position he posits without regard to the truth or to the damage such position causes.
Pieces of silver much?
R Eglin – Ric Jaffe is a SUPERB legal strategist. His advice in this article, written in June of 2016, was RIGHT ON TARGET. He was pointing out that the legal ideas of the time 2016) were not going to fly, and that there was a different direction that needed to be taken for success.
He was right – and the “anti-vax movement,” did, in fact go that different route – which is why that, now (2019), Big Pharma Vaccine Division is in a screeching, whining, whimpering fetal position, demanding that all those in the US Congress that they have been providing endless money for, come to their rescue.
We need to make Big Pharma into Little Pharma…