Children's Health Defense By Mary Holland, CHD Vice Chairman and Marsha Lessard, Virginia citizen, Mother, and Virginia Freedom Keepers Member.
On February 18, more than fifty parents crowded into a Senate room to testify before the Senate Health Subcommittee regarding a bill that requires school immunizations. The bill they considered wouvirginiald transfer the legislature’s decision-making authority over vaccine mandates to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Every vaccine on the CDC’s recommended list, except annual flu shots, would automatically be required of Virginia schoolchildren. Future CDC-recommended vaccines would be added to Virginia’s requirements too, without further deliberation. This would mean 13 additional vaccines against 8 diseases now, including hepatitis A, meningitis and the HPV vaccine for boys, and other vaccines in the future.
The Subcommittee voted 5-0 with one abstention in favor of the bill. But could there be a problem? The educated parents who took time out of their busy lives to testify think so. And notably not a single parent testified in favor of the bill — only physicians and medical representatives with professional and financial interests at stake.
Parents showed up for many reasons:
First, safety. Vaccines do not undergo the kind of rigorous safety testing that drugs do. Because vaccines are “biologics,” they can be tested for periods as short as 4 days, as for the hepatitis B vaccine, and are usually tested against other vaccines, not inert saline placebos. This kind of testing masks serious problems that only show up when vaccines are in widespread use.
The notion that vaccine injury is one is a million is a myth. A federal Agency for Health Research Quality study suggests that vaccine injury is as common as 1 in 38 vaccines given. Making matters worse, manufacturers and healthcare providers cannot be held liable — Congress granted them blanket immunity under the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.