Restoring Health Freedom: A key to survival
By Dewey Duffel
How would you like to have a “perfect” business, one where the government required everyone to be your customer? Imagine someone 150 years ago starting a business, one that was guaranteed many customers, large profits and long term survival. This business model targets sick people. The worst nightmare of this business is a healthy population where little illness exists and what exists is easily cured by cheap, safe and readily available natural foods, herbs and simple procedures. The dream scenario for optimum profit and longevity of this business would require each of the following conditions to be true:
• Medical methods and knowledge must focus on expensive drugs and surgery.
• Basic education as well as medical school curriculum must ignore knowledge that leads people to understand how to naturally care for their own health.
• Quality of the food supply must be low plus both air and water should be polluted.
• Laws should make herbs and vitamin supplements illegal or otherwise difficult to obtain.
• Laws must mandate one or more alleged “preventive medical” procedures so everyone becomes a customer.
• Legal protection must be provided to both the manufacturer and provider of the mandated “medical” procedure so that it is difficult or impossible to sue either one.
• Choose the mandated procedure for its ability to adversely impact long term health so mandated customers by necessity become “voluntary” repeat customers.
• A climate of unreasoning fear and respect for “authority” must exist where few question either the need for “health care products” or the laws which make certain products mandatory.
The conditions above exist in some significant degree today. Vaccines are accepted as mandatory for admission to school, children are routinely prescribed mood-altering drugs to control their behavior in class and the food American children and adults commonly consume is chemically-processed and mechanically-packaged “filler” devoid of nutrients and enzymes critical to neurological and physical health. Cancer, autism, diabetes, chronic fatigue and many other expensive-to-treat chronic diseases are epidemic as a result of these man-made conditions.
Despite spending nearly twice as much per capita annually ($5635) for health care than other developed countries, Americans' health care ranked last in an across-the-board comparison to healthcare in other developed nations, according to an April, 2006 study published by the Commonwealth Fund. Australia was ranked number one with comparative annual expenditures of $2,903, followed by Canada (3,003), Germany ($2,996), New Zealand ($1,886) and the UK ($2,331).
In 2000, the World Bank ranked the U.S. healthcare system 37th of 191 member nations.
What could be causing the failure of American healthcare and the increasing prevalence of acute and chronic illness in the wealthiest nation on earth?
The current legal climate
The U.S. government has been expanding its power at an alarming rate since 9/11. With the December, 2005 passage of the FY06 defense appropriations bill (H.R. 2863 1) the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) will effectively rule this country by declaring an emergency. The simple perception of a “credible risk” that a disease or biological threat may in the future constitute an emergency, allows the HHS secretary to issue a declaration requiring the manufacture, distribution and use of terrorist countermeasures. By amending the Public Health Service Act2 , both the government and the manufacturers of products used in a declared emergency “shall be immune from suit and liability under Federal and State law with respect to all claims for loss caused by, ... the use by an individual of a covered countermeasure...” 3
Can someone stop these actions or review their justification? No. Written into H.R. 2863 is the provision: “JUDICIAL REVIEW- No court of the United States, or of any State, shall have subject matter jurisdiction to review, whether by mandamus or otherwise, any action by the Secretary under this subsection.” 4
Liability for injury or death resulting from the use of these countermeasures is incurred only in cases of proven willful misconduct.. This law embodies a template for our country to quickly become a dictatorship. This federal threat to individual freedoms is re-enforced in the laws passed by individual states in response to federal encouragement.
Montana revised its law in 2003 to empower health officers to “ isolate or quarantine persons who refuse examination or treatment.”5 So, even Montana, a state with a tradition of self-reliant, freedom-loving individuals, has fallen for the insanity of cooperating with the federal government's plans for medical martial law.
Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a member of the Continental Congress, described what would happen if Americans failed to maintain “ownership” of their own bodies: “Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship...The Constitution of this Republic should make special provisions for medical freedom as well as religious freedom.”
Failure leads to mandate
It was the unbroken chain of vaccine failure-not success-that led to mandatory vaccination laws.
Dr. Jenner began the popularization of vaccination in England in 1796. He believed the mistaken notion that milkmaids were protected from smallpox because they acquired “cowpox” from cows and that this usually mild disease “immunized” them against smallpox. In reality, the greater immunity of most rural dwellers came from their lifestyle. Rural dwellers had the shortest farm-to-table transit time for food, thus the best quality, least-spoiled food, the cleanest water and the best year-round nutrition. So ruralites naturally had a lower rate of smallpox, milder cases and lower mortality rate if they did get “the pox.”
The most severe cases of smallpox were among the poverty-stricken slum-dwellers living in crowded poorly vented houses. These people were continually breathing polluted air from waste filled streets, drinking water contaminated by leaky or open sewers and ate nutritionally-deficient food.
Both general mortality rates and smallpox related deaths were declining in England before the introduction of vaccination due to improvements in diet, public sanitation and personal hygiene. Yet vaccination in England was “encouraged” until it became compulsory in 1853, at which time incidence of smallpox began to increase and failure to vaccinate became punishable by fine. By 1867, the penalty for failure to vaccinate was raised to a prison sentence. Five years later in 1872, another smallpox epidemic occurred among a highly-vaccinated British population, killing 44,840 mostly vaccinated people.
Following the 1872 smallpox epidemic, Leicester, a city of 200,000, decreased its smallpox vaccination coverage to only five percent of its infants and put its money and efforts into sanitation. During the next 20 years, Leicester reduced its smallpox cases to nearly zero and had the lowest smallpox rate in all England. 6
Though it was apparent to many influential people at the time that a healthy lifestyle prevents smallpox while vaccination spreads disease, it was not until 1896 that the vaccine mandate was repealed in Great Britain.
Since no coercion is necessary to induce the public to use safe and successful products, we can see that vaccine mandates were then-and are still-implemented because their inability to protect public health should not compromise the profit motive behind their production and administration.
False perception of “success” used to justify more mandates
The common belief is that vaccines prevent polio. Seldom mentioned is the fact that the number of cases of polio in 1952 was about 52,000 and by 1955, when the first polio vaccine was licensed, the number of polio cases had already dropped to 38,000. Cases of polio continued to decline though several states reported a temporary rise in polio cases closely following vaccination.
This temporary increase in several states, combined with other facts and data, show the vaccine to be a cause of polio-not a preventive.
Little mentioned in the popular press is that the definition of polio prior to vaccination required paralysis to occur for only 24 hours, while in the post-vaccine era the diagnosis of polio required paralysis to occur for a minimum of 58 days.
The definition of a polio epidemic also changed from 20 cases per 100,000 to 35 cases per 100,000 population. These definition changes largely removed polio from the news. Another factor which helped hide the facts was that, before the introduction of polio vaccine, polio was a broad diagnosis encompassing what later became several separate diseases. A case in point is that prior to vaccine use there were many polio cases and few cases of meningitis. After vaccine use there were few polio cases but many meningitis cases. A paralyzing disease by any other name is still polio, at least by the 1952 definition. Fiddling with the figures, however, made polio vaccines appear to be effective when, in fact, they were not. This illusionary success for both polio vaccines is cited today as an argument for more vaccine mandates.7
How is this state of affairs maintained?
Pharmaceutical companies accomplish their goals by influencing educational content, political and legal process, commercial advertisements and by manipulating the “news.” Medical schools get supplies, equipment and financial grants from pharmaceutical companies and, in return, medical schools teach classes of potential physicians that drugs and vaccines are the only way to prevent the spread of diseases.
Politicians who have little knowledge of the role of hygiene and nutrition in the prevention of disease, are encouraged to promote the use of drugs and vaccines with campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical industry lobbyists convince state governments to mandate vaccine products based on the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) of the CDC. ACIP members are chosen by political process and most ACIP members have direct ties to pharmaceutical companies. Few people realize that ACIP recommendations are financial in nature and have no scientific basis.
Ghost writers employed by pharmaceutical companies supply the press releases that are printed or broadcast as “news” but that are in reality nothing more than free advertisements. Editors dare not look too closely at these press releases and express an honest opinion lest they lose the bulk of their paid advertisements placed by pharmaceutical companies.
Why Vaccine Mandates are Wrong
Since smallpox was the first vaccine to be mandated in the U.S. in 1904, let us look at the reasons why mandatory vaccination policies should have been declared null and void from the beginning:
• The Constitution sets individual rights above the powers of government.
• The 1904 Supreme Court mandate was based upon mistakes and lies about the effectiveness of smallpox vaccine.
• When individuals voluntarily choose to not exercise a right, this free choice forms the basis for enlightened civilization; when individuals' rights are forcibly removed, this forms the basis for tyranny.
• When all individuals in a society, with few exceptions, are ordered to undergo vaccination, the scientific need to have a large comparison (control) population is defeated and it becomes impossible to tell what benefits, if any, are obtained and what harm the mandated procedure is causing in the population. This benefits the vaccine manufacturers but is detrimental to the interests of the people who must endure the vaccinations.
• Mandating that the majority of people receive a vaccination ignores or denies the fact that most people have natural immunity to any given infectious disease and, thus, no vaccination can ever benefit the majority of a population. Even if an effective vaccine were created, only a minority of individuals could benefit.
• All vaccines contain toxic components; everyone who receives them must, therefore, experience some harm. This unnecessary harm done to each member of the majority who can never benefit argues against vaccine mandates. These arguments apply to other mandatory medical treatments as well.
Who does informed choice benefit?
We have already mentioned the ineffectiveness of smallpox and polio vaccines. To those who argue that other vaccines are effective, consider that in India, in the 1970s a large population test of the tuberculosis vaccine (BCG) yielded lower rates of tuberculosis in the placebo group versus the vaccinated group.
An interesting tidbit was that this same vaccine was still selling in Europe over 20 years later. It is well documented that 90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality occurred before either specific vaccines or antibiotics were introduced. Understanding this fact alone debunks the false claims made for vaccine contributions to public health. In a sanitary and well-fed society, natural immunity exists in a high degree and requires no artificial “immunizations.”
Nothing underlines the value of informed choice more than the success of alternative medical treatments in the 1918 “Spanish Flu” pandemic. In 1918, flu cases (24,000) treated by mainstream medical practices (allopathy), experienced a mortality rate of 28.2% while 26,000 cases of flu treated homeopathically had a mortality rate of 1.05%. This is a good argument both for making informed choices and the right to make such choices.
A necessary ingredient in informed choice is the availability of factual scientific information rather than sales propaganda. Knowledge of true vaccine history is critical to making informed choices about vaccination issues.8
The unvaccinated, a public threat?
An argument frequently made against health freedom is that individuals who refuse vaccines constitute a public health hazard. A series of news articles in 2005 focused on unvaccinated segments of society, the Amish among others.9 It was found that these groups experience very low rates of autism compared to the general public. These groups made a large contribution to society by providing a relatively large group of unvaccinated individuals for scientific comparison purposes. If society in general had followed the leadership of the unvaccinated and refused to let government force vaccination upon our children for the last 30 years, then the number of children suffering from autism today would be less than 10 percent of the nearly 500,000 autistic children in the U.S. today who needlessly suffer from this terrible disorder.
Let the experts decide!
It is often argued that decisions regarding public health should be left in the hands of experts. This argument might have merit if the public health “experts” had attended schools where the curriculum was independent of pharmaceutical company influence and were not politically chosen for having views favorable to pharmaceutical company propaganda. In short, who we refer to as “experts” today are well-versed in pharmaceutical sales propaganda but totally deficient in the science of natural health principles.
It is necessary that informed choice be put back in the hands of the people. The people with the most at stake, namely the parents of precious children, will take the most care in making informed choices when they know that they, themselves, must be their own experts.
The Constitution Party National Platform outlines an ideal legal approach to health care rights in Health Care and Government posted on its web site. Its opening statement provides hope for all of us, “ The Constitution Party opposes the governmentalization and bureaucratization of American medicine.”11 I urge all candidates for public office, of all political parties, to adopt this concept and not shrink from applying its principles to reforming the current legal (or more likely, unconstitutional and illegal!) situation as regards health freedom.
(1) H.R. 2863, Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2006, Section C-- PUBLIC READINESS AND EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS ACT
See http://thomas.loc.gov/ , search for H.R. 2863
(2) Part B of title III of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 243 et seq.). Sec. 319F-3 (a) (1)
Entirety of Sec. 319F-3.TARGETED LIABILITY PROTECTIONS FOR PANDEMIC AND EPIDEMIC PRODUCTS AND SECURITY COUNTERMEASURES was inserted by H.R. 2863. See http://thomas.loc.gov/ , search for H.R. 2863
(3) and (4) Part B of title III of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 243 et seq.)., Sec. 319F-3 (b) (7):
(5) See Montana Code Annotated 2005, 50-18-107 section c. at http://data.opi.state.mt.us/bills/mca/50/18/50-18-107.htm
(6) See http://www.vaclib.org/intro/present/index3.htm
(7) See http://www.vaclib.org/basic/polio.htm
(8) See http://www.vaclib.org/basic/smallpoxindex.htm
(9) The Age of Autism: 'A pretty big secret' by Dan Olmsted
http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi/20051204-060313-6829r.htm
(10) http://www.constitutionparty.com/party_platform.php