Dear Tanya,
Great that you're advocating for choice in vaccination. I'm also in NY and following this closely. It's tricky to address people's concerns about unvaccinated children especially when it comes to religious exemption. To get that exemption parents aren't really able to discuss their concerns about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines but have to talk about hellfire and damnation.
Every time we talk to someone about the issue we have to remember that they are almost always operating on the assumptions that
1. Vaccines are safe
2. Vaccines are effective
3. The diseases we vaccinate for are too horrible to allow to occur in our society (I watched the shift in public perspective go from chicken pox being a normal annoying thing that you wanted your kids to get through and over with to a terrifying disease to be avoided, and I know my elders watched it happen with other childhood illnesses)
A friend and vaccine safety advocate says we have to plant the seeds of doubt on whether vaccines are safe and effective. RFK Jr's Children's Health Defense website is really great at doing this in a level headed way.
I think Physicians for Informed Consent is a super helpful organization. Here are their concise sheets you can print out to bring to your legislators.
Measles infection:
https://physiciansforinformedconsent.or ... es-DIS.pdf
Immunocompromised:
https://physiciansforinformedconsent.or ... n-RGIS.pdf
MMR Vaccine
https://physiciansforinformedconsent.or ... lesVRS.pdf
I have a letter I'm working on to give to my assemblyperson and will include the printouts above and a letter from attorney Michael Sussman about the religious exemption which I can forward to you.
Here's the text of my letter. It references all the vaccine bills. Good luck!
I’m writing to express my concern about some bills that you’ll be faced with in the near future. I really appreciate your thoughtful response to a previous letter I sent about safety and efficacy of vaccinations.
I encourage you to think about the impingement on human rights that mandatory vaccination without exemption would create. The fact that there are risks to any medical procedure should translate to requiring informed consent of the patient. We repeatedly hear the mantra that “vaccination is safe and effective” but the reality is that there are no studies testing any of these vaccinations on their own with a placebo control. The fact that the pharmaceutical industry stands to gain from mandating more and more vaccinations should also give us pause. Please advocate for more research and for more education for parents and patients about vaccination if you want to encourage utilization of these medical interventions, but please do not force people to use them. When it comes to public health management in the face of a vaccine preventable disease there are sensible quarantine approaches that can and do get utilized. (These were inappropriately implemented in Rockland County. Excluding healthy unvaccinated children from public spaces is not sensible for preventing infection. The order was ruled unconstitutional by 3 judges. Quarantining infected people and their recent contacts is effective.)
Please see the list of bills with my comments on each. I would be happy to provide resources as well as set up a meeting with you to discuss this issue further.
S2994 and Assembly A2371, which would repeal the religious exemption from vaccine mandates to attend school. My comment: Our local school district has well over 96% of students vaccinated. The tiny numbers of unvaccinated students are not going to impact herd immunity and are not creating a health crisis. Proper attention to quarantine of infected and unvaccinated students in the direct area of an outbreak is the appropriate public health management approach. Please see attached letter from Attorney Michael Sussman as he perfectly articulates the need to maintain religious exemption.
S4494 (Hoylman)/ A6847 (Gottfried), Requires recording all vaccines given to adults in a state database My comment: Healthcare records should remain between patient and practitioner, not the state. (this bill died in committee)
S2276 (Hoylman)/ A2316 (Dinowitz) Mandates flu shots to attend daycare or pre-school My comment: Flu vaccination has an abysmally low rate of effectiveness and carries risk, therefore should not be mandated.
S4244 (Krueger)/ A2316 (Fahy) Allows minors 14 and older to receive vaccines without parental knowledge or consent. My comment: If passed, minors will be subjected to more aggressive tactics to get them to consent to medical procedures. If anything we must work for more transparency between parents and children when it comes to health care, particularly sexual health as this is a field where minors tend to hide their choices from their parents and parents might not be educated as to the risks of telling their children that abstinence is the only option. How can we improve education and outreach for parents?This bill also protects pedophiles by circumventing mandated reporting
A6487 (Englebright) Requires all healthcare workers working with infants to get a Dtap My comment: Dtap covers diptheria, tetanus and pertussis. Vaccinated adults spread pertussis. We’ve seen fully vaccinated populations affected by pertussis outbreaks. We do not have diptheria in the US, Tetanus is not communicable between humans, and we are not seeing pertussis spread by healthcare workers (who tend to only have brief contact with the infants in their care) so this is an impractical bill.
S3899 (Krueger)/A973 (Paulin), Allows minors as young as nine to get Gardasil shots without parental knowledge or consent. My comment: I agree that minors need access to sexual education and healthcare and they should not be put under risk of parental retribution for their sexual activity. Minors should be able to go to a clinic for birth control and practical STD prevention and treatment. I would encourage modifying this bill to exclude HPV vaccination without parental consent. The HPV vaccination is fraught with risks, and a recent review by the Cochrane Collaboration revealed many adverse effects from this vaccination, that were then removed from their final report because of conflicts of interest for some of their board members. This led to the director speaking out and then being expelled. Cochrane used to be the gold standard of unbiased scientific review and sadly this is no longer the case. It was the controversial HPV vaccination that led to this breakdown of standards, and it’s been written about in prestigious medical journals since.
S298a (Hoylman)/A2912 (Paulin), Mandatory Gardasil for middle schoolers My comment: See above for HPV vaccine concerns. HPV infection tends to resolve in a few months without any intervention in healthy individuals. Expected immunity to HPV should not be a requirement to attend school. HPV immunity status does not affect the health of the school community during the school day. Again, more research and education are the answer, not a mandate.
And please work to pass these bills:
S477 (Rivera), Allows a physician’s decision on a medical exemption to prevail over bureaucrats
My comment: Healthcare decisions should remain between practitioner and patient. It is very dangerous to start to override the educated decisions of practitioners for their patients.
A7451 supports vaccination education and outreach
My comment: Informed consent should be the ethical standard of medical care. This bill supports funding education and outreach, which is a more appropriate response to dealing with unvaccinated populations who are able to be vaccinated.