Janet Levatin, MD

blog, Children's health, Dr. Janet's blogs, Opinion Pieces, Politics, Vaccines

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Jul

13

2015

Janet Levatin, MD

In all states of our nation except for two, parents have historically had the right to decline vaccinations for their children based on their religious and/or philosophical beliefs… until June 30, 2015, that is, when California Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 277 into law. This law removes the rights of parents to decline vaccines for their children and still send them to school. California, America’s most populous state, with over 10% of the population and an economy larger than most countries, has now joined Mississippi and West Virginia in denying its citizens a basic right, the right to decide what does and does not go into their bodies.

I started to write a blog several times about this extremely unfortunate development and found myself at a loss for words. There are so many things wrong with this policy that I hardly know where to start.

I have been studying the question of vaccine toxicity since the 1980s, when I saw three babies die of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), each within 24 hours of being vaccinated. Obviously, not all babies being vaccinated suffered the tragedy of SIDS, but all the SIDS cases I saw occurred in babies who had just been vaccinated. I instinctively knew that the vaccines were responsible, and thus began my journey to know more about vaccines and their associated problems. At the time there was no publicly available internet and I had access to only a couple of books on vaccine controversies. Studying vaccines back then was a lonely undertaking, consigned mostly to homeopaths, who had long known about the problems with vaccines.

We live in a different world now. There are a plethora of books, documentaries, web-sites, YouTube lectures, Facebook pages and articles documenting the undeniable problems associated with vaccines. While many of these resources have been created by lay people, many also come from professionals and are published in mainstream journals such as JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) and Pediatrics.

There are many reasons one may wish to decline vaccines, an inherently elective procedure. The main reason, as I see it, is that vaccines contain toxic ingredients with known negative effects, up to an including autism, autism spectrum disorder and death. Additionally, they fail to deliver the long-term immunity they promise. We have witnessed this failure in recent outbreaks of measles, mumps and pertussis where fully vaccinated people contracted the illness.

Let’s look at a few of the problems with this newly enacted law.

1. Forcing people to accept vaccines against their will violates several tenets of the Nuremberg Code.1 The Nuremberg Code, formulated as a result of the Nuremberg Trials at the end of the World War II, is a set of ethical principles that applies to human experimentation, and that has set the standard for human experimentation in the years following its adoption. Forced vaccination violates several tenets of the Nuremberg Code, including:

- The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

- The experiment should be set up in a way that avoids unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injuries.

- It should not be conducted when there is any reason to believe that it implies a risk of death or disabling injury.

We need to consider every vaccine as an experiment since the whole vaccine schedule has never been tested on children in a long-term, organized way. Additionally, the new law in California states that new vaccines can be added into the schedule, and then required for “any other disease deemed appropriate by the department, taking into consideration the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Academy of Family Physicians.” In other words, the number of vaccines required under SB277 may look very different in years to come than it does today.

2. This new law is discriminatory. There are people who can afford to move from California or home school to avoid forced vaccination. But for most, neither of these are options.  The law disproportionately affects those who are economically disadvantaged.

3. There are financial conflicts of interest behind the genesis of this law. It is no secret that pharmaceutical companies, the very companies who stand to benefit financially from vaccination policies, have lobbied the California legislature heavily. Pharmaceutical companies and the trade organizations representing them have made contributions to the campaigns of legislators who, in turn, support their efforts to give our children more vaccines.2 Couple this with the fact that pharmaceutical companies and the doctors who administer vaccines cannot be sued for bad outcomes due to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986,3 and the blatant corruption is impossible to ignore.

I encourage everyone to fight this latest assault on our health freedom and health choices. Our liberty and our lives are at stake. Whether you wish to accept or decline vaccines, we need to maintain freedom of choice. I urge everyone to contact their state legislators and their senators and congressmen to express their views. Now that that SB277 is law in California, it is only a matter of time before a similar bill will come to your state.

1. (Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10”, Vol. 2, pp. 181-182. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949.

2. http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article24913978.html

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Injury_Act