Introduction  |   Rebuttal  |   Questions  |   Observations  |   Errors  |   Majority?  |   Health_Boards  |   Same_Medicine  |   One_Side  |   Results  |   Conclusions  |   Ballot  |   References
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A Foundation for and Rebuttal of Mandatory Vaccination Laws

by Dewey Duffel

Introduction

In November 2000, at their 57 th Annual Meeting in St. Louis,  a doctors group passed without a single “no” vote, a resolution to oppose vaccine mandates.   "Our children face the possibility of death or serious long-term adverse effects from mandated vaccines that aren't necessary or that have very limited benefits," said Jane M. Orient, MD, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) Executive Director.   "This is not a vote against vaccines," said Dr. Orient. "This resolution only attempts to halt blanket vaccine mandates by government agencies and school districts that give no consideration for the rights of the parents or the individual medical condition of the child." (1)

Mandatory vaccination

The previous year at AAPS 56th Annual Meeting some problems with vaccine mandates were discussed.

The following quote is from a:  “Presentation by Kristine M. Severyn, R.Ph., Ph.D.
56th annual meeting            Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho            October 14, 1999

Jacobson v. Massachusetts

Mandatory vaccination laws are made in state legislatures. The precedent for such laws goes back to a 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Jacobson v. Massachusetts (14, 15). Mr. Jacobson, an adult resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, refused to be vaccinated, opposing a 1902 Cambridge Board of Health mandate “that all inhabitants of the city...be vaccinated...” Jacobson claimed that he had “suffered seriously from previous vaccination,” as did his son. All adults over 21 years of age who refused vaccination were fined $5.00.

The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the right of a state legislature to enforce mandatory vaccination, claiming it a proper exercise of the state's police power to enact “health laws” reflecting dominant medical beliefs and those of the majority of society. Thus, the opinion of the minority should not subvert the opinion of the majority, or “the interests of the many [should not be] subordinated to the wishes or convenience of the few.”

Noting the controversial nature of vaccination, the U.S. Supreme Court stated, “...in a free country, where the government is by the people...what the people believe is for the common welfare must be accepted as tending to promote the common welfare, whether it does in fact or not” [emphasis added]. This means that until public opinion changes, with subsequent changes in state vaccination laws, the courts will not consider challenges to state vaccination laws. (1)

Rebuttal

Review:

We have the advantage of looking back one century on the 1905 Supreme Court decision and judging the results with 20-20 hindsight. So without being overly critical of the judges who made a difficult decision, let us ask some questions, make some observations and discuss the details.

Questions:

Would mandatory vaccination exist if vaccination was financially unprofitable?

Would mandatory vaccination be justified if vaccines were proved to be of little or no worth?

Would mandatory vaccination be justified or tolerated if it were widely known that a safe and highly effective natural immunization existed?

Would mandatory vaccination be justified or necessary if vaccines were scientifically proved to be both safe and effective?

Observations:

The U.S. Supreme Court decision suffered from:

Multiple constitutional errors:

When an individual voluntarily gives up the exercise of a right, this voluntary cooperation forms the basis for civilized living. When an individual has his rights denied by force or by deception, this forms the basis for tyranny.

To those who object that one can not practice their religion if such practice might put another at risk, there are several problems:

First: it has never been proved that vaccination constitutes immunization.  While immunization theory is well developed, the science of epidemiology proves that sanitation and nutrition are societies' great immunizers, not vaccination. Laws regarding sanitation are widely accepted and there are no laws regarding the eating of balanced, healthy, immunizing diets. Vaccination was made mandatory because early attempts to immunize with vaccines failed. A majority of people observing the results of both the precursor of vaccination, called variolation, and vaccination itself refused to accept a procedure that was both dangerous and ineffective. Vaccine proponents blamed vaccine failures on a lack of vaccination coverage, but increasing vaccinations to very high  percentages of society resulted in major smallpox epidemics. Areas that rejected vaccination in favor of sanitation proved sanitary reforms to be the actual effective immunizing activity against smallpox.  Laws based upon the failure of any procedure or product should be removed from the books as soon as possible.

Secondly: The founders of this country placed the ability to practice ones religion so high in their priority that they were willing to risk life, family and fortune to secure this freedom.  What would the men at Valley Forge think if we told them that comfort and safety are more important than religious freedom or the right to practice the health principles laid down by our religion?

Thirdly: If one does not have the right to a religious practice that allegedly puts another person at risk, then it is equally true that one also does not have the right to make a dangerous scientific test based on a theory that by necessity is a belief. Also live virus vaccine trials put the the community at large at risk. If individuals have no right to refuse vaccines, then likewise individuals have no right to receive vaccines for vaccination puts at risk both the individual vaccine recipient and the community. Because vaccines are never tested for long term side effects before putting the product on the market, it is a scientific necessity to allow a portion of the population to remain unvaccinated in order to provide the community with a control group. It is logical that this control group is selected on a voluntary basis but it is illogical to punish or eliminate this control group which provides an important benefit to society. At a minimum, society owes a debt of gratitude to our unvaccinated individuals for their valuable contributions.

Errors regarding the majority opinion, an ancient problem:

Does there exist a majority of believers who will force vaccination upon the minority of unbelievers?  Vaccination was made mandatory in England in 1853 because  of two reasons: After over 50 years of voluntary vaccination policy, smallpox incidence was high and secondly the majority of people believed the practice to be ineffective and dangerous based on common observations. In some areas, as much as 90 percent of the population avoided vaccination. In Leicester, a city in England, following the 1872 smallpox epidemic, 95 percent of parents rejected smallpox vaccination for their children when given the choice. In the United States circa 1920, (Year uncertain) a pro-vaccine medical doctor stated, "Since people cannot be vaccinated against their will, the biggest job of a health department is always to persuade the unprotected people to get vaccinated. This we attempted to do in three ways, education, fear, and pressure. We dislike very much to mention fear and pressure, yet they accomplish more than education because they work faster than education, which is normally a slow process. During the months of March and April, we tried education and vaccinated only 62,000. During May we made use of fear and pressure and vaccinated 223,000 people."----.Dr John Keller (4)    Coming closer to our own time, a flu vaccine was licensed in the USA in 1945. After 35 years, the vaccine's acceptance was only 20 percent of the targeted population of individuals 65 years of age and older. By 1988, a period 43 years after introduction, usage was at 33 percent; it took about 50 years to achieve a voluntary majority of over 50 percent acceptance of the influenza vaccine. Following an anthrax scare in October of 2001, postal workers were offered an experimental anthrax vaccine mandated for the military and 98% of postal workers refused vaccination. The majority of people are perfectly willing to “wait and see” when a vaccine is introduced. Mandatory vaccine programs are NOT the will of the majority. The U.S. Supreme Court in their 1905 decision stated, “We are not prepared to hold that a minority,... should have the power thus to dominate the majority”. (5) Yet this subversion of the majority will by the minority will based on opinion is precisely what has happened in the United States.

Health Boards Presumed to be fit:

The 1905 Supreme Court decision stated that it was presumed that health boards are fit instruments for making decisions slated for mandate. For a health board to be a fit judge of what is good for the health of the community, the board must consist of people whose activities prevent disease, namely:  Plumbers, street cleaners, garbage collectors, clean air and water experts, nutritionists and organic food producers. On the other hand, medical doctors and nurses are trained to deal with injury and illness. Their knowledge of disease prevention is not only minimal but the practice of disease prevention is contrary to their primary income producing activities.  Today, the majority of medical personal are trained in schools where the curriculum is heavily influenced by pharmaceutical companies through grant money, gifts of equipment, etc. Thus medical people know sales propaganda  about vaccines but the real science of health and immunity must be found outside of medical school study and pharmaceutical publications. In spite of the conflict of interest and their lack of qualifications, most heath boards are dominated by medical doctors to this day.  Doctors should not be allowed to vote on issues in which they have a financial interest, I.E. vaccination. Further, the question “do vaccines work?” is not properly asked of doctors but rather those who possess long term, wide area statistics in order to compare the health of the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated.  A brief study of this subject, called epidemiology, shows that sanitation and nutrition are the great immunizers of society, not vaccines.  Health boards as constituted today are unfit  to make vaccination recommendations, how much less fit are they to make mandatory laws for the use of any pharmaceutical product.

My medicine only works if you take the same medicine:

Smallpox vaccine contains live virus and waste products (lymph, blood, pus) from a sick cow. Thus vaccinated individuals not only risk their own health but put the community at risk by spreading the vaccine virus. Why does no one question their “right” to put the community at risk? Individuals get vaccinated on the theory that they will be protected against exposure to contagious disease. So what perverse twist of logic leads one to conclude that their vaccination will not protect them, but if they force everybody else to take the vaccine then the protection of others will keep their worthless vaccination from being tested? Indeed, it is the failure of vaccines to protect that allows fear to dictate the illogical position that “with enough vaccinations, even the unvaccinated are protected, while with too few vaccinations, not even the vaccinated are protected.” If you are having trouble making sense of this situation, remember that not much sense was ever put into the concept. Even with over one and one half centuries of experience, starting in England, no justification has ever been proven for the concept that heath boards need to have their recommendations turned into police enforced mandates.  If vaccines work, then those individuals who voluntarily get vaccinated will be protected.  And if vaccines do not work, then the unvaccinated will serve as the control group to scientifically prove the vaccines did not work. The fact that unvaccinated individuals serve as a scientific control is threatening to vaccine promoters.

Consider only one side of an argument:

The 1905 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court suffered from a failure to investigate the vaccine paradigm scientifically. In the Supreme Court decision, the supporting document quoted pro-vaccine concepts about smallpox vaccine effectiveness that have since been proven false.

If vaccines are safe and effective, would that justify mandatory vaccination? In my opinion, no. In a society with good sanitation and nutrition, contagious diseases affect only a small percentage of the population, thus the effort to prevent infectious disease should strive to make the susceptible minority more healthy and not target individuals who are naturally immune with unnecessary vaccinations. And in fact, plenty of evidence exists to prove that vaccinations do not benefit public health.  Mandatory vaccination programs today apply to entire groups even though only a small number of individuals in the group are at risk. Policies which allegedly originated in the concept that the majority have legitimate power over the minority, were in fact never based on the will of the majority. Today's mandatory vaccination laws violate the rights of an over whelming majority based on the concept that vaccines are needed to protect a small minority of the community.

Mandatory vaccination makes it impossible to have a large control group of unvaccinated individuals that is necessary in order to measure whether or not a vaccine works effectively and safely over a long period of time.  These large groups of unvaccinated individuals  provide important benefits to society and in 2005 several major news items provided evidence that the unvaccinated have better health than the vaccinated at least as far as autism is concerned.  (6)

Results of 100 years of Mandatory Vaccination:

The mandatory vaccination law of 1905 has paved the way for a marriage between government and industry. In this marriage, government finds that its first duty is the protection of its business partner while the people are the subject of a vast experiment and are forced to consume a dangerous and harmful product which is rarely tested for clinical effectiveness. Also the people have little access to unbiased and accurate information and no vote on whether or not their tax dollars will be spent to promote vaccines. Conflicts of interest abound. The CDC, an agency tasked with both promoting vaccines and protecting the public interest, has a 2.1 billion dollar per year budget for the promotion of vaccines. Yet almost nothing is spent to scientifically test vaccine safety or effectiveness or to find natural effective alternatives to vaccines.

Today parents are steamrolled into allowing new born babies to be injected with a vaccine (Hep b) that causes more deaths in the first year of life than the disease that the vaccine is alleged to protect against causes in the first 15 years of life.  Nine year old girls are being targeted for a mandate of three doses of a vaccine that has never prevented a single case of cancer but which is alleged, based on pharmaceutical company indirect measurements, to prevent a disease which will peak 31 to 45 years later in the girls life. Most children may not attend school until they have approximately 30 injections of mandated and potentially lethal chemistry.

The original mandatory vaccination law alleged to provide for the protection of the majority at the expense of the minority. Today, diseases that affect less than one percent of the population have a vaccine which is required for school attendance. Thus, in excess of 99 percent of children must receive a dangerous and harmful product allegedly  to protect less than one percent. How does this constitute a proper application of a law designed to protect the majority?

The marital team of government and industry routinely mandates new vaccines without proving need, effectiveness or safety. The vaccine paradigm is a combination of sales propaganda, junk science and disproved theories. Increasing evidence exists that vaccines produce more harm than good. Corruption of the  scientific process and waste of taxpayer dollars characterize the government-industry vaccination team.

Conclusions:

The rights of the majority are the same rights as those of the minority and it is an illusion to think that the rights of one group can be violated without the rights of other groups suffering as well. Mandatory vaccination is based upon the will of a minority, not the will of the majority. The removal of vaccination choice has set a precedence that has led to current threats to the right of choice for treatment of cancer and other deadly diseases.

Mandatory vaccination laws were a reaction to the early failures of vaccination to work and the dominant medical minority's perceived need to defeat the wishes of the majority. If vaccination was a safe and effective procedure the results would sell the product (vaccines). Results of vaccination do not sell vaccines because vaccination has never been proven to deliver a net benefit. The only threat unvaccinated individuals pose is to the profits of the pharmaceutical industry by the simple fact that unvaccinated individuals prove vaccines are unnecessary, ineffective and unsafe. In the final analysis, mandatory vaccination is the forced purchase and use of a commercial product. Mandating sales and product use are not justified in a free society; indeed, mandatory vaccination is not justified even in a monarchy or dictatorship.

Some in the medical profession are likewise against government mandating either doctors or patients choice. Following is the closing statement of Dr. Jane Orient, a pro-vaccine M.D., in testimony given to Congress in 1999 at a hearing regarding Hepatitis B vaccine.

"CONCLUSIONS [by Dr. Jane Orient]

Public policy regarding vaccines is fundamentally flawed. It is permeated by conflicts of interest. It is based on poor scientific methodology (including studies that are too small, too short, and too limited in populations represented), which is, moreover, insulated from independent criticism. The evidence is far too poor to warrant overriding the independent judgments of patients, parents, and attending physicians, even if this were ethically or legally acceptable.

AAPS opposes federal mandates for vaccines, on principle, on the grounds that they are:

1. An unconstitutional expansion of the power of the federal government.

2. An unconstitutional delegation of power to a public-private partnership.

3. An unconstitutional and destructive intrusion into the patient-physician and parent-child relationships.

4. A violation of the Nuremberg Code in that they force individuals to have medical treatment against their will, or to participate in the functional equivalent of a vast experiment without fully informed consent.

5. A violation of rights to free speech and to the practice of one's religion (which may require one to keep oaths).

AAPS would specifically oppose the campaign for universal immunization against hepatitis B, even if the above did not apply, because the safety of the vaccine is in question." (7)

If you have lingering doubts about the wisdom of mandatory vaccination, then ask yourself, your friends and even your enemies how you or they would vote on the following ballot measure if such a proposition were put to a test:

Ballot proposition: [Hypothetical]

The state has the right to use its police powers to force myself and/or my under legal age family members to consume any product that the state choses even if that product is objectionable to myself and/or my under legal age family members in any one or more of the following ways: Use of the products violates our religious concepts, the product is obtained by using a cruel procedure, the product is obtained in a manner that is unethical,  that my own informed choice tells me that use of this product is unsafe, the product contains cancer causing or promoting ingredients, the product has never been subjected to scientific testing, the product is unnecessary based on the existence of safe, reliable and cheap natural alternatives, the product use is based on recommendations made by individuals loyal to the product manufacturer or who have another financial interest in recommending the product's use.

Vote for one only:  

c I agree with the concept that the state has the right to force me or my under legal age family members to consume products against my will.

c I disagree with the concept that the state  has the right to force me or my under legal age family members to consume products against my will.

Let us know how you and your friends would vote on this issue, if given the opportunity.  Let us know, as well, how your enemies vote on this issue.

References:

(1) http://www.vaccinationnews.com/DailyNews/June2001/MandatoryVaxKrisSev.htm

(2) Page 7: Source: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=197&invol=11

   U.S. Supreme Court   JACOBSON v. COM. OF MASSACHUSETTS, 197 U.S. 11 (1905)

   197 U.S. 11   HENNING JACOBSON, Plff. in Err.,  

   v.  COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS.

   No. 70. Argued December 6, 1904. Decided February 20, 1905

(3) Source: http://www.foundationforhealthchoice.com/vaccine.html

(4) Source: http://www.whale.to/b/hoax1.html

(5) Page 16 : see (2) above.

(6) See http://www.vaclib.org/basic/unvaxhealth.htm for articles on The Healthy Unvaccinated.

(7)  http://ffitz.com/nyvic/health/hep-b/aaps.htm

STATEMENT of the ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN PHYSICIANS & SURGEONS
to the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources of the Committee on Government Reform, U.S. House of Representatives, RE: HEPATITIS B VACCINE, Submitted by Jane Orient, M.D. June 14, 1999

Introduction  |   Rebuttal  |   Questions  |   Observations  |   Errors  |   Majority?  |   Health_Boards  |   Same_Medicine  |   One_Side  |   Results  |   Conclusions  |   Ballot  |   References
This document in Microsoft Word format is here.