On Wednesday morning House Majority Leader Matt Ritter, Representative Liz Linehan and Representative Josh Elliott, held an impromptu press conference at the Capitol concerning the removal of Connecticut’s religious exemption for vaccinations to enter school. According to Representative Ritter, this has been a desire of his for sometime. He claims there is a massive spike in children not getting vaccinated. A small but growing body of people are using the religious exemption and he questions whether they have merit or not. Ritter went on to say that it is his job to protect immunocompromised children who cannot be around unvaccinated children in Connecticut registered schools. However, unvaccinated children do not carry diseases anymore than any other human being. Rather, children who are recently vaccinated can be contagious and carry the diseases he is so afraid of.
According to St. Judes Children’s Research Hospital Visiting Guide:
“Any person with a weakened immune system, including patients with cancer or HIV infection should not receive live virus vaccines unless instructed to do so by a doctor. Some vaccines are made from live viruses. Currently, these include oral polio, smallpox, chickenpox (varicella), and MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccines. These vaccines may pose a threat to your child. Do not allow people to visit your child if:
◆ They have received oral polio or smallpox vaccines within 4 weeks; or
They have rashes after receiving the chickenpox (varicella) vaccine”
Live virus vaccines can and do shed. Thirty teenagers in LA all came down with whooping cough and all thirty were vaccinated. The unvaccinated teens were not effected.
Ironically while the press conference in Connecticut was in session, a naval ship has been quarantined for a few months at sea due to an out break of Parotitis, which clinically resembles mumps. According to CNN, “A US warship has essentially been quarantined at sea for over two months and has been unable to make a port call due to an outbreak of a viral infection similar to mumps.” Parotitis is bacterial and the mumps is viral, the soldiers actually had a viral case of the mumps if it was indeed viral and not bacterial. Currently Merck is being sued for fraud for the mumps portion of their MMR vaccine. James Lyons-Weiler, PhD writes, “Two whistleblowers, former employees of Merck, Inc. have alleged in a lawsuit in a Pennsylvania court that they were told to commit scientific fraud by falsifying data on the apparent efficacy of Merck’s vaccine against the mumps virus by adding rabbit antibodies to human samples. The whistleblowers allege that the original efficacy of Merck’s MMR vaccine against the mumps virus was only 18%, and to secure and prevent the loss of the contract for CDC’s use of the MMR vaccine, they were instructed to spike human samples with rabbit antibodies to increase the efficacy measurement of human samples to over 94%.”
There was a lot of talk about science and an inability for people to discern pseudo science from hard science at the press conference. Yet there were no references as to what pseudo science specifically the three legislators are up in arms about. According to Linehan and Elliott, FB and google are responsible for the proliferation of “pseudo science.” A quick search on google about vaccines takes you to all the sites that were recommended by the legislators. FB is full of all kinds of content. Most critically thinking adults can discern what information is real or “fake”. It is doubtful that parents are making medical decisions based on FB posts. Not to mention the fact that there are a lot of ad hominem attacks going around online. It is also doubtful that any parent would want to throw themselves into the “anti-vaccine” debate unless something is really bothering them about vaccines.
Representative Elliott explained that a small fringe group of loud and angry people are stuck in a bubble of information that feeds what they want to hear. He went on to say that this fringe group of people are scaring doctors and stopping them from testifying at hearings. Speaking of the AAP who is in favor of eliminating religious exemptions, Elliott said, “They did not send doctors out because they have to go through, just this, this insane amount of hostility, and anger, and fear, which we understand from a certain population, but these aren’t the people we’re trying to reach. We’re trying to reach everyone else.” While Elliott made accusations about Connecticut citizens, close to a hundred of them were gathered in the hall outside the press conference. The hall was full of mostly women, mothers and their children, who support the religious exemption. There was no yelling or threatening going on. The people were there exercising their constitutionally protected right to redress their government.
There have been doctors at every hearing he was talking about. All you have to do is check the public records to see.Though hearings of this nature can sometimes be tense in the room, nothing of note to promote fear has been reported. Elliott offered no evidence to back his claim either. Just as he offered no science to back his claims. Later that same day Representative Elliott brought in a doctor from Yale to testify for a bill that he is co-sponsoring in public health HB 7199 to mandate HPV and the Meningitis vaccines.
Representative Linehan went on to lament how they have been trying to educate this group of people for years. People she feels do not have the right science behind them. She claimed that study after study has come out to say that vaccines do not cause autism. However, in 2019 Dr. Zimmerman, the lead witness for the government in vaccine court in 2007, said he was taken out of context when he said vaccines do not cause autism. He meant vaccines did not cause autism in the particular case he was called as a witness for. Investigative journalist Sheryl Atkinson covered the story on Full Measure and has made his affidavit available for the public. Dr. Zimmerman, “More specifically, I explained that in a subset of children with an underlying mitochondrial dysfunction, vaccine induced fever and immune stimulation that exceeded metabolic energy reserves could, and in at least one of my patients, did cause regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder.”
In 2014 William Thompson, a CDC researcher blew the whistle on a coverup linking MMR to autism. Eco Watch writes, “Thomas Frieden, the director of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), has blocked CDC whistleblower, Dr. William Thompson, from testifying in congress on scientific fraud and destruction of evidence by senior CDC officials in critical vaccine safety studies regarding the causative relationship between childhood vaccines and autism.” Invariably, this is the study they use to say vaccines do not cause autism. Thompson writes, “My name is William Thompson. I am a Senior Scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where I have worked since 1998. I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.” Autism, and host of other serious adverse events are listed in the post marketing data on the DTAP vaccine, Tripedia, “Adverse events reported during post-approval use of Tripedia vaccine include idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, SIDS, anaphylactic reaction, cellulitis, autism, convulsion/grand mal convulsion, encephalopathy, hypotonia, neuropathy, somnolence and apnea. Events were included in this list because of the seriousness or frequency of reporting.”
As the press conference came to a close Ritter said, “One of the concerns you would ever have is putting someone in front of some sort of authority, legal authority whether it is judicial or administrative, and sorta of do an oath test, what is my religion. That’s not what we do in America.” Yet that is exactly what he is proposing to do in Connecticut. After the press conference, some mothers were in tears. Afraid they may have to leave their home to flee religious persecution, or be forced to vaccinate their child so they can go to school. All children in Connecticut are guaranteed a right to an education regardless of their faith, or medical records. Elliott went further to say that he is frustrated by the piles and piles of paper the people dump on him. Its veracity he says, and he has no way to know where it came from, he can’t keep up with it. It’s just pseudo science according to him. If you go to the Connecticut General Assembly and read through testimony and visit the links and studies sent to legislators you can see what citizens are saying for yourself. The testimonies are passionate, well informed and succinctly stated. The information contained in the testimonies points to studies by numerous legitimate scientists and researchers. There is nothing there that is threatening or hostile that I could find.
The legislative body as a whole not only needs to protect the current religious exemption, they should remove all vaccine mandates all together. That does not mean to ban vaccines, that simply means leave medical and healthcare choices up to citizens and their doctors. Medical decisions are not something the legislator has jurisdiction in. Especially when there is risk and scientific disagreement. Vaccines are a medical product. They do not work for all people in the same way, and some people can be seriously injured by them. Vaccination should always be by choice with informed consent. The Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 indemnified vaccine manufactures making them liability free if their vaccines cause injury or death. The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, NVICP, has paid out four billion dollars in vaccine injuries since 1988. The program is funded by the federal government. The pharmaceutical companies do not have to pay anything for damages and they enjoy full immunity.
The press conference revealed a religious discrimination on the part of the three legislators who obviously hold low regard and disdain for the people whose rights they want to eliminate. Ritter, Linehan, and Elliott, made disparaging ad hominem attacks while using fear tactics and misinformation to justify infringing upon the First Amendment rights of the citizens gathered outside their closed doors. They are ignoring their duty to serve all their citizens even the minorities they do not like. Science is never settled. To claim research is pseudo science as a reason to take away civil rights without open and public debate is egregious. This is a serious claim that must be hashed out with scientists from all sides of the debate in a public forum. Legislators serve the people, not the other way around. It would behove them, especially the Majority Leader to remember, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
References:
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/13/politics/us-warship-quarantined-virus/index.html?no-st=1552673378
4.https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-whooping-cough-harvard-20190226-story.html
5.Sheryl Attkisson, https://sharylattkisson.com/2019/01/06/dr-andrew-zimmermans-full-affidavit-on-alleged-link-between-vaccines-and-autism-that-u-s-govt-covered-up/
6.https://www.vaccineshoppe.com/assets/pdf/tripedia.pdf
7.https://www.cga.ct.gov/asp/menu/CommDocTmyBillAllComm.asp?bill=HB-07199&doc_year=2019
See the full press conference here:
http://www.ctn.state.ct.us/ctnplayer.asp?odID=16105