Attorney challenges pediatrician's attack on vaccine religious exemptions

Attorney challenges pediatrician's attack on vaccine religious exemptions








(NaturalNews) The following pediatrician's commentary attacking vaccine
religious exemptions was published online in Raleigh's News &
Observer (N&O) on February 24, 2012. As the N&O failed to
publish my response, I'm publishing it here, where fairness is welcome.
It follows the pediatrician's article immediately below.

Vaccinations should be covered by mandate, Friday, February 24, 2012

As a practicing pediatrician and internist, it makes sense to me that
if the government can mandate that all insurers cover contraceptives,
even institutions that opposed such treatment on religious grounds,
then it follows logically that government should also mandate all
children be immunized regardless of the parents' stated religious
convictions.

This is a significant statement because most state laws, as in North
Carolina, mandate that any child attending public school must be
immunized; the only way out of this is if the parents claim they are
opposed to immunizations on religious grounds. But as any pediatrician
will tell you, the vast majority of these parents who make this claim
have no such religious conviction; for a variety of non-religious
reasons, they just don't want to immunize their kids. So they
intentionally mislead providers (with a wink) so that we sign off on
their kids' kindergarten physical so they can get the benefit of a free
public education without being immunized.

There is currently a pertussis (whooping cough) outbreak in a private
school in Chapel Hill that, not surprisingly, has a large number of
unimmunized kids. These infected kids, until they are diagnosed and
treated, expose other children in and outside the school to whooping
cough, including unprotected infants who have not yet completed their
vaccine series, and it is these susceptible small children who really
suffer and/or die from such diseases - ones that are preventable if
only some other parents' child had been vaccinated.

Perhaps this irresponsible choice should no longer be protected as a
religious exemption. But I imagine it will remain under First Amendment
protection as such a change in law would lead to quite an outcry of
protest, the kind of outcry perhaps also justified by the Catholic
Church.

James Kurz, Pittsboro
The length limit was waived.
-----

Response:

Dear Dr. Kurtz:

Thank you for your comments. I didn't realize that NC pediatricians
have psychic powers (know what all exempting North Carolinian parents'
religious beliefs are) and are legal experts (know what qualifies for a
vaccine religious exemption, and therefore, can be sure that their
psychic subjects don't qualify for one). Even more amazing, though, was
the lack of knowledge your comments displayed in your claimed area of
expertise. To explain:

1) As for knowing others' beliefs, that speaks for itself -- you don't.
Your assertion is pure conjecture and has no place in a serious
discussion. To say that you are concerned that some religious
exemptions may be disingenuous would be reasonable; anything more is
sheer bigotry.

2) As to what qualifies legally for a religious exemption, that
requires study of state and federal legal precedent, statutes and
regulations, and sufficient legal training to be able to put that study
into proper legal perspective. Yes, facts don't necessarily require
credentials -- truth speaks for itself -- but non-referenced assertions
are nothing more than uninformed personal opinions, as my next section
reveals.

3) As for the blame you assign to exempt children:

A. The CDC tells us that 5% - 15% of vaccinated children are not
immune.[1] JAMA tells us that only 1% - 2.5% of children are exempt.[2]
Furthermore, unvaccinated children can develop natural immunity, and
according to the CDC, may not even develop symptoms in the process.[3]
So, vaccination status is not an indicator of immune status, and exempt
kids are at most a negligible concern given the far greater number of
non-immune, vaccinated kids. Indeed, this is why the CDC reports that
most outbreaks occur in vaccinated children. If you're worried about
outbreaks caused by non-immune kids, the first step should be to test
the vaccinated kids, so we can quarantine all of the non-immune ones,
since outbreaks are clearly due to them most of the time.

B. Pertussis typically runs in 3-4 year cycles (for unknown reasons);
exemptions don't.[4] So, pertussis outbreaks can't be attributed to
exempt kids at all.

C. Well over 50% of Americans are adult baby boomers who haven't been
vaccinated in decades. Vaccine immunity lasts only 2-10 years, but
infectious diseases haven't returned.[5] In fact, research has proven
that vaccine antibodies do not guarantee disease immunity, and that the
herd immunity theory isn't reliable, so the entire theoretical
foundation of vaccination may be flawed.[6]

The bottom line is that exempt children pose no significant health risk
to anyone, and your accusations are based on false assumptions and
misplaced.

Your beliefs typify those of the pediatric community not because they
are correct, but because yours is a profession driven by politics, and
not objective science. Few to none of the commonly held assumptions
about vaccines withstand strict scientific scrutiny. I invite you to
subvert professional conformity to scientific objectivity, to
investigate the matter personally for yourself, and to form your own,
independent conclusions. You'll risk the condemnation of your peers for
the mere act of daring to think for for yourself, but that's a small
price to pay to be free of the manipulative reach of political agendas
and fully within your own personal integrity. Whatever your conclusions
about any given piece of the larger controversy, if you look openly
and objectively, I guarantee you will never be the same. I also
guarantee that you will be discouraged from questioning the status quo
by most of your peers; that in and of itself speaks volumes about the
need for more of you to do so.

Alan Phillips, J.D. is a leading national vaccine rights attorney and vaccine legislative activist. For more information, see www.vaccinerights.com, or email Alan at attorney@vaccinerights.com.

---

[1] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Vaccines and
Immunizations, Misconception #2. The majority of people who get disease
have been vaccinated, http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/6mishome.htm

[2] Non-medical Exemptions to School Immunization Requirements, The Journal of the American Medical Association, http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/296/14/1757.full

[3] See, e.g., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Vaccines and
Immunizations, Glossary, "Asymptomatic infection: The presence of an
infection without symptoms. Also known as inapparent or subclinical
infection. http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/about/terms/glossary.htm"

[4] See, e.g., Broutin Helene, Large-Scale Comparative Analysis of
Pertussis Population Dynamics: Periodicity, Synchrony, and Impact of
Vaccination, America Journal of Epidemiology, Feb. 2005, http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/161/12/1159.full; and A. Korobeinikov, Estimation of effective vaccination rate: pertussis in New Zealand as a case study, p. 272, April 2003, http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/maini/PKM%20publications/157.pdf

[5] Forced Vaccinations, Government and the Public Interest (Part I), Is herd immunity real? Russell Blaylock, M.D., Neurosurgeon, The Epoch Times, January 28, 2010

[6] See, e.g., Antibodies Do Not Equal Immunity: Mumps Outbreak In 95% Vaccinated Population here (citing the British Medical Journal); and Antibody Theory
(citing published studies in Neurology, the New England Journal of
Medicine, Proceedings of the Society of Experimental Biology and
Medicine, the British Medical Council Publication, and the Journal of
the American Medical Association, among others).

About the author:
Alan Phillips, Attorney at Law
P.O. Box 3473
Chapel Hill, NC 27515-3473
919-960-5172
Vaccine Rights: www.vaccinerights.com
The Pandemic Response Project: www.pandemicresponseproject.com



Source:-

http://www.naturalnews.com/035314_pediatricians_vaccine_exemptions_health_freedom.html