Docs to Dems: 'How can we force vaccination?'

Less than one day after a prominent doctor warned that a totalitarian push for universal vaccination might be developing, California Democrat Sens. Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein began calling for exactly what the medical expert feared.

At the same time, California lawmakers are moving to force parents to vaccinate their children – even if the families object to immunizations on religious grounds. A bill taken up by the state's senate would allow parents to decline the vaccines only if immunizations pose a medical threat to children with conditions such as allergic responses or weak immune systems.

"While a small number of children cannot be vaccinated due to an underlying medical condition, we believe there should be no such thing as a philosophical or personal belief exemption, since everyone uses public spaces," California's Democrat senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, wrote in a letter to state Health and Human Services Secretary Diana Dooley Wednesday.

"As we have learned in the past month, parents who refuse to vaccinate their children not only put their own family at risk, but they also endanger other families who choose to vaccinate."

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Meanwhile, California state Sen. Ben Allen announced he is co-sponsoring legislation with fellow Democrat Richard Pan to end parents' rights to exempt their children. Gov. Jerry Brown has signaled his support for the legislation, even though he preserved religious exemptions to state vaccination requirements in 2012.

According to state records, 13,592 California kindergartners currently have vaccination waivers, and 2,764 of those are based on religious beliefs.

Allen said, "The high number of unvaccinated students is jeopardizing public health not only in schools but in the broader community. We need to take steps to keep our schools safe and our students healthy."

Just 24 hours earlier, Dr. Lee Hieb, an orthopedic surgeon and past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, warned in her WND column, "How vaccine hysteria could spark totalitarian nightmare," of how government attempts to forcibly vaccinate people. She argued that parents and patients "should have the freedom to choose whether to vaccinate their children."

"Medical ethics are clear: No one should be forced to undergo a medical treatment without informed consent and without their agreement to the treatment," she wrote. "We condemn the forced sterilization of the '20s and '30s, the Tuskegee medical experiments infecting black inmates and the Nazi medicine that included involuntary 'Euthanasia,' experimentation and sterilization. How can we force vaccination without consent?"

She added, "Vaccination is a medical treatment with risks including death. It is totally antithetical to all ethics in medicine to mandate that risk to others."

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Dr. Hieb wrote that, since 2005, there have been no deaths in the U.S. from measles. However, there have been 86 deaths from the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, or MMR – 68 of them in children under 3 years old. And there were nearly 2,000 disabled.

The physician also warned that mandatory vaccination is a slippery slope.

"If you think the government has the right to forcibly vaccinate people – for the good of society – what is to prevent them from forcibly sterilizing people, or forcibly euthanizing people, or forcibly implanting a tracking device – for the good of society?" she asked. "You may think those examples are extreme (although two-thirds have happened), but the principle is the same. You are allowing government to have ultimate authority over your body."

Who is to blame for measles?

While the CDC said measles is brought into the U.S. “by unvaccinated [Americans or foreign visitors] who are infected in other countries,” Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet suggested government and media focus on the possible source of the outbreak: illegal immigrants streaming across the U.S.-Mexico border. She wrote that measles is widespread in parts of the world from which the illegal immigration surge is coming – in particular, Central America.

"Because the U.S. declared that it had eradicated measles in 2000, parents were right to wonder why they should take an unnecessary risk," she wrote in a column Thursday. "They are not the cause of this current outbreak. Being unvaccinated does not give you measles.

"Lawlessness on our borders is the culprit that re-introduced the measles virus to our territory. The same government that broke our immigration laws is now blaming U.S. parents for the predictable consequences of its policy. The U.S. government both facilitated and encouraged the flood of illegal border crossers, and assisted their rapid dispersal to cities across the U.S."

A Feb. 4 Washington Times editorial noted that left-leaning news sites and blogs cite data from the World Health Organization showing measles-vaccination rates in Mexico and Central America are higher than the U.S. rate of 92 percent.

"The president's political allies argue that this clears the illegals from blame, but the infected poor and usually illiterate youths who streamed across the border unchecked last year may have been drawn from those who were not vaccinated," the Post editorial stated. "We don't know, because there was no screening of the arrivals for disease of any kind, nor whether they had had the vaccinations most American children receive. They were quickly dispersed across the country by the Department of Homeland Security."

Some on the left have even suggested parents who don't vaccinate their children should be sued.

Dr. Vliet said the media and government must stop blaming parents and "face the fact that this measles outbreak has many causes, starting with our own government's failed policies."

"There are valid reasons to vaccinate children and adults," she wrote. "There are valid reasons not to do so. Both sides of the decision are medical ones, best made between physician and patient, based on the circumstances of each individual patient."

CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden

CDC warns against believing Internet 'rumor'

In another development Thursday, CDC Director Tom Frieden warned Americans concerned about the potential risks of vaccines to stop believing what they read on the Internet.

"Mark Twain said rumor can get halfway around the world before truth puts its boots on," Frieden told NBC News. "And one of the things that we try to do is get out there immediately anytime there are rumors with information on social media, on the web, on Twitter – to identify where the rumors are coming from and answer them.

"But the Internet is a big, open place and people may think that all of the information on the Internet is relatively of the same validity."

However, Frieden himself has a reputation for being less than honest with the American people in recent months during another health scare.

It was Frieden who, for months before three people were diagnoses with Ebola on American soil, insisted that the U.S. was prepared and any hospital could treat the virus under CDC guidelines. Nonetheless, the CDC had neglected to provide Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital with an infection control team to care for Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan – a move that might have prevented a second case of Ebola in Dallas.

Frieden's handling of the situation prompted Rep. Tom Marino, R-Pa., and Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, to call for his resignation in October 2014.

Marino released a statement saying Frieden had released information to the public that was "cryptic and in some cases misleading," lending to a "false sense of security."

"That is exactly the opposite of the CDC director's primary responsibilities – to communicate clearly and honestly," he said. "I have no ill will toward him personally but he should resign his position effective immediately."

Government websites tracking reported vaccine injuries

Most of what Frieden considers Internet "rumors” warning of vaccine injuries are government websites tabulating claims against the government's vaccine injury compensation program.

As WND reported, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, part of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, was set up in 1988 to pay for the care of Americans, mostly children, profoundly injured by vaccines. The intent was to hold the vaccine-producing pharmaceutical companies harmless for the relatively rare but catastrophic damage vaccines sometimes cause.

In November, the nonpartisan Government Accounting Office issued an efficiency report on the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, including this up-front admission:

Vaccines save lives by preventing disease in the people who receive them. In some instances, however, a vaccine can have severe side effects, including death or an injury requiring lifetime medical care. VICP provides compensation to people for injuries and deaths associated with certain vaccines for medical and other costs.

A comprehensive review of its 26-year history by the Health and Human Services department found as of March 5, 2014:

• 13,964 vaccine injuries reported to and compensated by the federal program (including 143 injuries caused by the MMR vaccine); and
• 1,132 vaccine deaths (including 57 caused by the MMR vaccine).

Of all the adverse vaccine reactions tabulated, the biggest offender was DPT (diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus), which has resulted in 3,285 injuries and 696 deaths in the U.S.

Vaccine-caused conditions compensated by the federal government since 1988 have included a wide variety of serious medical issues.

They include children who suffered anaphylactic shock and brachial neuritis as a result of getting any tetanus-toxoid-containing vaccines; others who developed encephalopathy, a brain disease, from pertussis antigen-containing vaccines, as well as from MMR vaccines; paralytic polio and vaccine-strain polio viral infection from a polio live virus-containing vaccine; intussusception (prolapsed intestine) from vaccines containing live, oral, rhesus-based rotavirus; chronic arthritis from rubella virus-containing vaccines; and vaccine-strain measles viral infections from a measles virus-containing vaccine.

Dr. Vliet said passions run high on both sides of the vaccination issue.

"Some parents object on moral grounds," she said. "Some parents fear the risk of autism. Even though we have no proof of a causal link between vaccines and autism, it is hard to ignore the anguish families have experienced when a normal, healthy, vibrant child suddenly becomes withdrawn and loses language skills soon after a mandatory vaccine. We simply may never know a 'definitive' answer on this issue.

In her column, Dr. Hieb concurred, "Science is never 'concluded.' Mr. Obama and other ideologues may think the truth is finalized ('The science is indisputable'), but the reality is our understanding of disease and treatment is constantly being updated. … The last word on vaccination is not in. It hasn't even begun to be written."