Vaccine Nation
Stephen Marshall, November 20, 2002
In what is shaping up to be one of the most draconian weeks since the Bush Administration
took power, Tuesday1s Senate ratification of the Homeland Security Act leaves little
doubt that corporate interests have a major stake in the post-9/11 re-engineering
of American law.
Just one day after the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court1s
decision to expand the Justice Department1s power of surveillance over U.S. citizens,
Republican lawmakers squeezed the controversial bill through the Senate with a last-minute
promise to moderates that it would later be gutted of 3special interest2 provisions,
one of which shields pharmaceutical companies from liability in vaccine-related injury
suits.
As it stands, the American public will now be subject to forced immunization,
under the penalty of fine and imprisonment, without the potential of legal recourse
against the companies that manufacture them. And, while Republicans were quick to
spin the liability protection as necessary for the bolstering of unfettered bio-technological
research (in an era of potentially nation‹crippling bio-terrorism), one need only
read the fine print that retroactively limits the liability of corporations in major
class action suits to see that this is one of the most overtly cynical cases of the
government1s exploitation of the public panic over terrorism to further its political
goals and pay back blue chip corporate donors.
But, in order to fully understand the reasons for and implications of this new
legislation, we must trace the more recent history of vaccinations and the culture
of tacit federal complicity that has, since the 9/11 attacks, sought to further entrench
the pharmaceutical interests with those of the Bush Administration and, more specifically,
in the domestic fight against terror. What emerges is the troubling scenario of a
federal government which has deliberately and callously chosen to propel the interests
of a potentially criminally negligent corporate sector onto the very people it has
been elected to protect. Leaving us, it seems, with the now ubiquitous question:
for whose interests are they securing the homeland and at what cost to the freedom
of its citizenry?
Stepping back to a decade before the specter of forced vaccinations was even conceivable,
evidence began to surface that pediatric vaccinations may have some causal relationship
to the staggering rise in autism among American and Western European children. What
researchers discovered was that Thimerosal, a commonly used vaccine preservative,
contained toxic levels of mercury which could have devastating effects on the neural
tissue of young children. Alarmed by the geometrically increasing cases of child
autism in the United States (the number tripled in the 901s alone), a national coalition
of concerned parents and medical practitioners sought to expose the government to
scientific data proving the correlation between infant brain injury and mercury-laden
vaccine formulas. But it wasn1t until 1997, when a totally unrelated FDA study into
federal guidelines on mercury toxicity uncovered evidence that essentially corroborated
the coalition1s allegations, that the medical establishment began to seriously question
the safety of thimerosal-laced vaccinations.
Quoting from a recent New York Times Magazine article, illuminatively titled The
Not-So-Crackpot Autism Theory: The F.D.A. team's conclusions were frightening. Vaccines
added [from 1995 -1999] had tripled the dose of mercury that infants got in their
first few months of life. As many as 30 million American children may have been exposed
to mercury in excess of Environmental Protection Agency guidelines -- levels of mercury
that, in theory, could have killed enough brain cells to scramble thinking or hex
behavior. Incredibly, despite a 1999 FDA conclusion that children who received the
recommended number of vaccinations were being exposed to unsafe levels of mercury,
the core medical establishment elevated its collective denial to nearly psychotic
heights.
While some doctors preferred to blame the environment or offer other, equally
untenable, theories for the tragic rise in autism, others simply wrote off the oversight
as a clinical error without ever turning it back to the pharmaceutical companies
who had manufactured the vaccines for public use. Dr. Neal Halsey, chairman of the
American Academy of Pediatrics committee on infectious diseases from 1995 to 1999
(the period in which the mercury levels reached their peak) was quoted in the same
Times Magazine article: ''My first reaction was simply disbelief, which was the reaction
of almost everybody involved in vaccines,'' Halsey says. ''In most vaccine containers,thimerosal
is listed as a mercury derivative, a hundredth of a percent. And what I believed,
and what everybody else believed, was that it was truly a trace, a biologically insignificant
amount. My honest belief is that if the labels had had the mercury content in micrograms,
this would have been uncovered years ago. But the fact is, no one did the calculation.''
It was not until the 1999 FDA recommendation that vaccine manufacturers 3voluntarily2
drop Thimerosal from their formulas that anti-vaccine coalitions gained some political
traction and public support for their claims against the major pharmaceutical companies.
But, for hundreds of thousands of behaviorally impaired children, this realization
may have come too late. In what could well be one of the most potentially tragic
stories of the last half century, the medical establishment has acted about as expediently
as the Catholic Church in dealing with pedophiliac abuse by its priesthood. In fact,
many doctors continued to administer Thimerosal-laced vaccinations right up until
the last dosages left the manufacturer plants. A practice that seems, at the least,
professionally negligent when you consider the volume of anecdotal evidence and public
outcry that was being leveled at the practice of giving children mercury-inclusive
vaccinations.
"It's outrageous to think that injecting a child with all that toxicity is
an acceptable risk," said Bernard Rimland, director of the Autism Research Institute
in San Diego. "It's also outrageous that despite such compelling evidence of
harm, the medical community would subject children to it." And so it is under
this climate of intense scrutiny and potentially devastating class action litigation
that the Senate passed the Homeland Security bill, with its future and retroactive
liability protection for the vaccine-manufacturing pharmaceutical sector. Just at
a time when mainstream news publications have finally begun to publicly air and corroborate
long-standing accusations of a major cover-up by pharmaceutical companies of their
guilt in producing mercury-poisoned vaccines to a generation of child immunization
patients, many of whom have developed autism and other forms of neural damage as
a result. And it may not end there.
In a radio interview broadcast after the Senate vote, Dr. Len Horowitz, one of
the leading voices for increased public scrutiny of the pharmaceutical sector, warned:
"This legislation not only impacts the victims of mercury poisoning, but equally
guarantees that other ongoing class action lawsuits, such as those waged on behalf
of polio vaccine recipients who developed cancer from monkey virus contaminations,
will have no legal recourse.
Nor will those affected by Gulf War Syndrome as a result of drug and vaccine side
effects, military personnel recently inoculated who became ill from anthrax vaccinations,
and claimants who cite recent studies increasingly proving early hepatitis B vaccines
triggered the international AIDS pandemic." Putting this all into perspective,
Big Tobacco could have learned a lot from the pharmaceutical giants.
One of the chief beneficiaries of the Homeland Security provisions is Eli Lilly,
a former Thimerosal producer who has become the poster child for mercury poisoning
class action law suits. When executives of Eli Lilly were interviewed about the last
minute provision for a November 16 article in the St. Petersburg Times, they said
they were 3pleased with the amendment but [had] no idea how it wound up being attached
to the homeland security bill.2 And, while the paper did allude to the fact that
Lilly had contributed $1.6 million to congressional candidates before the November
5 election, the most of any pharmaceutical corporation, it did not report that Sydney
Taurel the firm1s Chairman, President and CEO was "....appointed in June 2002
to the President1s Homeland Security Advisory Council, a select group whose members
were chosen to provide George W. Bush with advice on homeland security matters."
Nor did it recount the particularly troublesome fact that, in 1977, George Bush
Sr. was made a director of Eli Lilly, a position that was offered to him by former
Vice President Dan Quayle1s father, who then owned a controlling interest in the
company. The legacy of the Bush family1s ties to U.S. pharmaceutical interests and,
specifically, Eli Lilly, is an exhaustive subject of research itself. Suffice it
to say, there is ample evidence for us to understand the current Bush Administration1s
desire to provide sanctuary for the company from its ever increasing number of alleged
victims. What is, perhaps, more alarming than this blatant level of political cronyism
is the little known MEHPA legislation and the direct implications it holds for citizens
and doctors who refuse to trust the vaccines forced upon them by this government
and its allegedly, criminally, negligent pharmaceutical backers.
To backtrack, the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act was first drafted in
December, 2001. Four days before Christmas, actually, so we can safely assume that
it was not something that was encountered with the most reassuring degree of public
scrutiny. But, as with much of the post-9/11 legislation, the Act came into being
and was swiftly endorsed by one of the Bush Adminstration's seemingly endless entourage
of white knights. In this case, Dept. of Health and Human Services Secretary, Tommy
Thompson. In describing the new legislation, even the typically bland USA Today Health
and Science reporter Mimi Hall could not veil its ominous potential:
A model law developed for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
and provided to state legislatures last year would give authorities the right to
enforce quarantines, vaccinate people, seize and destroy property without compensation,
and ration medical supplies, food and fuel in a public-health emergency. In other
words, the worst-case-scenario interpretation of the legislation is that U.S. citizens
living in MEHPA adopting states will: * have a mandatory vaccination or be charged
with a crime,* get a mandatory medical exam, or be charged with a crime and, Furthermore,
* doctors in those states will give the exam or be charged with a crime * property
can be seized if there is "reasonable cause to believe" that it may pose
a public health hazard... it can be burned or destroyed and you will not have recourse
or compensation. Now, as far as the powers granted to the State Governor under the
provisions of the Act, they are what you would expect. The Governor is granted unrestricted
power to declare an emergency at his own discretion. The legislature can not interfere
for at least 60 days and, even after thatdeadline, a two-thirds vote of both chambers
would be needed to block the dictatorial powers.
Since the latest reports regarding the number of states that had passed the law
were from last summer, we cannot confirm their accuracy. But, as of late July, USA
Today reported that "16 states and the District of Columbia have passed all
or parts of the model law. It has been rejected or stalled in 22 states." One
of the first states to pass it was Secretary Thompson's own Wisconsin (he was formerly
the Governor). And, as Barbara Flynn, founder of CHERUBS reported, the criminalization
of vaccine-resistors is hardly symbolic:
On February 27, 2002, the Wisconsin Legislature passed a Mandated Vaccination/
Emergency Health Powers Act which calls for a $10,000 fine and /or nine months in
prison for those who refuse vaccinations. In describing the way that Federal agencies
are using monetary incentives to fuel pro-MEHPA legislation, Flynn cited this case
from her home state of New Jersey:
In an article in New Jersey1s Daily Record on January 20, 2002, District 21 Assemblyman
Dr. Eric Munoz promised to spearhead a Rapid Mass Smallpox Immunization Plan for
New Jersey. And in the February 1, 2002 edition of the Star-Ledger we find that the
CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has offered New Jersey $26.8 million
to "come up with a plan" by April 15, 2002.
So, as you can see, there was a very strong movement coming from the Administration's
core clinical assets for the passage of this Act. And, as history proves, this is
not the first time that the American citizenry has faced this kind of authoritarian
directive from the medical establishment. Here is a quote from Jamie Murphy's seminal
book on vaccines, What Every Parent Should Know about Childhood Immunization:
In 1902, Cambridge Massachusetts Board of Health passed an ordinance that required
everyone to get smallpox vaccinations every 5 years or pay a $5 fine. Henning Jacobsen
and his son who had both suffered severe and prolonged reactions to the vaccine refused
both the vaccine and the fine. Both were found guilty by the Massachusetts Supreme
Court and Jacobsen vs. Massachusetts became the first and only vaccination case to
reach the highest court. The Supreme Court ignored compelling evidence that the vaccines
did not work and were dangerous. "While we do not decide and cannot decide that
vaccination is a preventative of smallpox, we take judicial notice of the fact that
this is the common relief of the people of the State, and with this fact as a foundation
we told that the statute in question is a health law, enacted as a reasonable and
proper exercise of police power."
ncredibly, the Supreme Court was basing its decision on the widely held, public
conception of vaccines instead of any empirical, scientific evidence. Which can be
a dangerous thing. Especially, as we have seen, when it comes to vaccination.
The new Homeland Security bill has now, once again, pushed the debate over vaccines
and their potentially harmful effects outside of the public realm. Reacting to the
news of the Senate vote, National Vaccine Information Center president Barbara Loe
Fisher summed it up thusly: "Several years ago the Centers for Disease Control
(CDC) commissioned the creation of the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act which
would give sweeping new powers to public health officials. They have tried to get
that law passed in every state but have failed so far. So now they are going to go
federal and get the power they have wanted for years. This bill is a violation of
freedom in the name of protecting freedom. At the very least there should be informed
consent protections in the bill to allow exemptions to vaccination and medical treatment
for conscientious and religious beliefs as well as quarantine protections for those
who exercise them.2 In his remarks following the Senate vote, President Bush called
the new Homeland Security legislation 3the most extensive reorganization of the federal
government since the 1940s.
And while there is no doubt about the fact that he is at the helm of a verifiable
dismantling of the American socio-political super-structure - a process upon which
the citizenry seems to have very little impact - we must not lose sight of the one
physical realm that we should, at all costs, remain autonomous over. Our bodies.
If this Administration is allowed to progress, unchallenged, with this new assault
on the human right to consensual medical treatment, we will have fallen to the status
of guinea pigs... defenseless before the poking and prodding by State practitioners
with all manner of biological technologies. If ever there was an issue that should
congeal the masses around the protestation of this ever-advancing incursion on our
civil liberties, it should form as the last barrier to that final border. Our skin.
And perhaps we should begin by demanding answers to the most basic of questions.
Namely, if the vaccines are so effective, then why are those who opt out of them
considered such a risk to the immunized populace?
Especially to the extent that they are going to be criminalized and fined? And,
furthermore, if such drastic measures are being contemplated in respect to the collective
health and welfare of the U.S. population, why can't more scrutiny and funding be
allocated for an investigation into the rise in autism among child immunization clients,
as well as an entire generation's sudden affliction of "attention deficit disorders"?
Otherwise, we may just wake a little too late from our collective political somnambulism...
but just in time to hear the benevolent nurse whisper, "Now just bend over...
this won't hurt a bit."
Stephen Marshall is co-founder and Creative/Strategic director of GNN.
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