How The Plan To Force Vaccination Gave Birth To The National ID, A Government He

[Guest guest]

THE NATIONAL ELECTRONIC VACCINE TRACKING REGISTRY

 

BY BARBARA LOE FISHER

How The Plan To Force Vaccination Gave Birth To The National ID, A

Government Health Records Database, and the End of Medical Privacy

 

_http://www.909shot.com/Loe_Fisher/blfTracking.htm_

(http://www.909shot.com/Loe_Fisher/blfTracking.htm)

 

History of Mandatory Vaccination

Immunization laws in the US are not federal, but state mandates. The

authority of U.S. states to promulgate regulations which protect the public

health

and safety is well established, having historical roots in health regulations

created in the colonial states during the 18th century. A seminal Supreme

Court decision in 1905, Jacobsen v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), affirmed

the authority of state legislatures to assign " police powers " to health

officials to enact quarantines and enforce mandatory vaccination laws to

prevent

epidemics. Although the historic and legal precedent for state authority to

enact and enforce mandatory vaccination laws is clear, it is not without legal

limitations and ethical imperatives.

 

State public health laws in the U.S. can be traced back to the 18th and 19th

centuries when unpredictable epidemics of highly contagious, dangerous

diseases such as yellow fever, typhoid fever and smallpox would sweep through

crowded, unsanitary port cities after diseased immigrants would disembark from

boats and infect the community. Eventually volunteer citizen committees formed

to quarantine the boats entering the harbors for weeks until those

disembarking were certified " disease-free. "

At the turn of the century, after doctors had taken over these volunteer

citizen committees and funding from taxes supported the beginnings of a state

and national public health infrastructure, the first state vaccination laws

were enacted by legislatures at the urging of physician public health

officials.

Soon the idea of quarantining those with infection during epidemics extended

to those who were not vaccinated, such as excluding unvaccinated children

from school during smallpox epidemics.

The Supreme Court Speaks in 1905

In 1905, a man named Jacobsen and his son sued the state of Massachusetts

for requiring them to get a second smallpox vaccination or pay a $55 fine.

Jacobsen refused to get re-vaccinated or pay the fine, claiming he and his son

had had a bad reaction to a previous smallpox vaccination and were afraid they

would be injured or die by a second one. Jacobsen maintained that forcing him

to be revaccinated was " an assault upon his person " and violated his

Constitutional rights.

 

The Supreme Court rejected the evidence Jacobsen presented to show that the

smallpox vaccination can cause injury and death and that doctors cannot

distinguish between those who will be harmed and those who won't be harmed by

the

vaccination. The Court concluded " The matured opinions of medical men

everywhere, and the experience of mankind, as all must know, negate the

suggestion

that it is not possible in any case to determine whether vaccination is safe. "

 

The fact that the nine Supreme Court justices at the turn of the century did

not have accurate medical information upon which to base their

precedent-setting decision is as understandable as it is unfortunate. It has

been proven

in the succeeding 94 years, most recently in the U.S. Claims Court in

Washington, D.C., where more than 1 billion dollars has been awarded to some

1,000

American families whose children have died or been injured from the adverse

effects of childhood vaccines, that often doctors cannot predict ahead of time

which children will react to vaccines and die or be left with mental

retardation, medication-resistant seizure disorders, learning disabilities,

chronic

arthritis, paralysis or other immune deficiencies and brain damage.

 

Between 12,000 and 14,000 reports of hospitalizations, injuries and deaths

following vaccination are made to the government's Vaccine Adverse Events

Reporting System (VAERS) every year, yet it is estimated that fewer than one

percent of all doctors report serious health problems which occur following

drug

or vaccine administration. The fact that genetic and other as yet

unidentified biological factors can place some individuals at higher risk for

vaccine-induced injury and death calls into question the constitutionality of a

one-size-fits-all forced vaccination policy that does not take into account

individual biological differences.

 

This is a critical point in measuring the consequences of assigning police

powers to public health officials for the purpose of enforcing vaccination,

particularly in cases where parents suspect their children are at increased

risk for reacting to vaccines even though health officials, anxious to achieve

a

100 percent vaccination rate, disagree. In their opinion, the 1905 Supreme

Court justices acknowledged that vaccination must not be forced on a person

whose physical condition would make vaccination " cruel and inhuman to the last

degree. We are not to be understood as holding that the statute was intended

to be applied in such a case or, if it was so intended, that the judiciary

would not be competent to interfere and protect the health and life of the

individual concerned. "

 

Therefore, when interpreting Jacobsen v. Massachusetts in 1999 it is

important to remember that, although the Court stated that states may enact

" such

reasonable regulations established directly by legislative enactment as will

protect the public health and the public safety, " the Court also made it clear

that mandatory vaccination laws must not be applied unreasonably so as to

result in harm to individuals. When public health officials in 1999 make the

argument for government-forced vaccination, they often omit mention of this

signal by the US Supreme Court that the state does not have the right to

command

that an individual sacrifice his or her life in the name of the public health.

 

What, then, did the 1905 Supreme Court mean when it went on to declare that

" it was the duty of constituted authorities primarily to keep in view the

welfare, comfort and safety of the many, and not permit the interests of the

many to be subordinated to the wishes or convenience of the few " ? The " wishes

or

convenience " of the few certainly does not translate into the " lives " of the

few, but, nevertheless, the historical context in which this declaration was

made is extremely important.

 

Utilitarianism and Sacrifice of Individuals

In 1905, the political doctrine known as " utilitarianism " was a popular

philosophical tenet which had been developed by a 19th century British

philosopher and science devotee, Jeremy Bentham. A consequentialist theory,

utilitarianism judges the rightness or wrongness of an action by its

consequences and

holds that an action that is moral or ethical results in the greatest happiness

for the greatest number of people. With its emphasis on numbers of people,

Bentham created utilitarianism primarily as a guide to state legislative

policy. Karl Marx used utilitarian principles to formulate his economic

theories,

while modern cost benefit analyses are also descendents of utilitarianism.

In 1927, the renowned American jurist Oliver Wendall Holmes embraced the

utilitarian rationale when he used Jacobsen v. Massachusetts to justify the

forced sterilization of a mentally retarded woman to, in effect, protect the

public welfare. Writing for the majority in a 8-1 Supreme Court decision, Buck

v.

Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), Holmes said " The principle that sustains

compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. "

 

Not long after, Hitler would embrace the same kind of rationalization used

by Holmes in that stunning 1927 legal opinion and go on to pursue his own

brand of social engineering to eliminate from society those individuals deemed

by

the Third Reich to be genetically defective or inferior. At the Doctor's

Trial at Nuremberg after World War II, physicians employed by the German state

forwarded a utilitarian defense to justify euthanasia of the mentally and

physically handicapped and the conducting of medical experiments on individuals

without their informed consent. They maintained that the sacrifice of some

individuals would improve or save the lives of many. It was at the Nuremberg

Trial in 1947 that the full measure of the tragic moral failure of

utilitarianism was finally revealed.

 

The Public Health Empire

The statements made by the Supreme Court in 1905 must be viewed in their

historical context to be interpreted reasonably and judiciously in 1999. What

is

undeniable is that Jacobsen v Massachusetts, which confirmed the right of

state legislatures to assign police powers to physicians employed by the state,

has been used by state and federal health officials to build a powerful and

massive public health infrastructure in the US during this century. This

public health infrastructure and operation of the mass vaccination system within

it is fueled by billions of tax dollars as well as funding by a pharmaceutical

industry eager to capitalize on government-forced purchase of its vaccines

by all citizens.

 

Operating as an independent executive authority with funding from, but

little oversight by, the legislative branches of government, this public health

empire created by government health officials has seen its most dramatic growth

in the last 25 years. Its power over and reach into the life of every

American now threatens our privacy, our liberty and the biological integrity of

our

children and grandchildren.

 

Nowhere is this threat more evident than in the creation of a national,

government operated vaccine tracking registry system that will tag all American

citizens with a national ID number at birth and track their movements

throughout life for the express purpose of enforcing vaccination with all

government-endorsed vaccines. It was the desire by government health officials

to

enforce citizen compliance with mandatory vaccination laws that first created

the

need for a National ID number and the national electronic medical records

database promoted by the Clinton Administration in 1993.

 

An Abuse of Police Powers

And yet, even the most zealous interpretation of Jacobsen v. Massachusetts

can come to the conclusion that this invasion of privacy and threat to

individual liberty constitutes an abuse of the police powers originally

assigned to

public health officials by state legislatures to protect the public from

smallpox epidemics. Today, public health officials are using Jacobsen v.

Massachusetts to force vaccination of all children with 33 doses of 10 viral

and

bacterial vaccines by age five for childhood diseases as benign as chicken pox

and diarrhea, and for hard-to-catch adult diseases transmitted through

contaminated blood like hepatitis B. Waiting in the wings are several hundred

new

vaccines being created in government and drug company labs using live viruses

and genetically engineered bacteria often grown on human or animal cell tissue

cultures to theoretically prevent everything from ear infections, stomach

ulcers and the common cold to herpes, gonorrhea, and HIV. Most, if not all, are

being slated by public health officials for future use by all children when

drug companies put them on the market.

 

As the use of multiple vaccines to suppress all infectious diseases

increases, so do the rates of chronic illness such as asthma, learning

disabilities,

attention deficit disorder, autism, juvenile diabetes, multiple sclerosis,

chronic fatigue and other autoimmune and neurological dysfunctions which have

crippled many children and young adults during the past few decades. The price

this and future generations will pay for unrestricted police powers wielded

by government health officials forcing vaccination in a vacuum of scientific

knowledge is as yet unknown, but landmark reports published in 1991 and 1994

by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences are

revealing.

Committees of non-government, non-industry physician experts reviewed the

medical literature for evidence that vaccines can cause injury and death and

confirmed that the DTP (Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis) vaccine can cause acute

brain inflammation and permanent brain damage that ranges from learning

disorders to severe and profound mental retardation; the DT

(Diphtheria-Tetanus)

vaccine can cause Guillain-Barre syndrome, including death, as well as brachial

neuritis; the rubella vaccine can cause acute and chronic arthritis; the

live oral polio vaccine can give polio to the person being vaccinated or to

someone who comes into contact with that person's body fluids; and the MMR

(measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine can cause shock and death from measles vaccine

strain viral infection. But because there were so few scientific studies

investigating vaccine-induced immune and brain dysfunction in existence, the

Committee was not able to properly evaluate a long list of vaccine-associated

health

problems, such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis, and concluded:

The lack of adequate data regarding many of the [vaccine] adverse events

under study was of major concern…. The committee encountered many gaps and

limitations in knowledge bearing directly or indirectly on the safety of

vaccines.

These include inadequate understanding of the biologic mechanisms underlying

adverse events following natural infection or immunization, insufficient or

inconsistent information from case reports and case series…and inadequate

size or length of follow-up of many population-based epidemologic studies.

 

A Political Agenda

Although Congress passed the Immunization Assistance Act in 1965, setting up

categorical grant programs to states to provide federal funds to purchase

vaccines for public health clinics and establish immunization programs, it was

not until Dale Bumpers became Governor of Arkansas in 1971 that the idea of

using vaccination as a political tool became fashionable. In 1973, he and his

wife, Betty, enlisted the help of the media and the Centers for Disease

Control (CDC) and then called out the Arkansas National Guard to vaccinate

every

child in Arkansas.

 

The national publicity generated by that action helped to catapult Bumpers

to the US Senate in 1974. In 1976, when Jimmy Carter was elected President, it

was Dale and Betty who persuaded Jimmy and Rosalyn and HHS Secretary Joe

Califano to map out a nationwide campaign to enforce vaccination laws. Bumpers

explained, " Betty went over to see Rosalyn and talked to her about it and said

'You know, this is something the President can do so that when he runs for

reelection, he can say the government did it.' Because you know, the

government was in such disrepute, nobody thought the government could do

anything. "

 

Bumpers was successful in doubling annual federal appropriations for vaccine

programs from $14.5 million to $33 million in 1978 and to $46 million in

1979, and by 1989 vaccine appropriations hit $141 million. On June 14, 1999,

President Clinton announced the establishment of the Dale and Betty Bumpers

Vaccine Research Center, with $200 million in annual funding. Clinton said

" Until

an AIDS vaccine is tested and approved, it will remain the primary mission

of the Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center…. I look forward to the

day when I can come back here...heralding another great vaccine achievement

for mankind, the end of AIDS. "

 

In 1997, Clinton issued a public challenge to government and industry

scientists to put a vaccine for AIDS on the market by 2007. That same year, a

member of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the federal

committee that sets national vaccine policy, publicly reminded government and

industry HIV vaccine developers to test the candidate AIDS vaccines in children

because a future AIDS vaccine will be targeted for use in all 12-year-old

children.

 

A 1986 Law To Eliminate Liability

After national publicity in 1982 with the broadcast of the NBC-TV

documentary DPT: Vaccine Roulette informing the public about DPT vaccine risks,

the

vaccine manufacturers and physician organizations lobbied Congress for

legislation to protect them from vaccine injury lawsuits. Parents of vaccine

injured

children, who co-founded the National Vaccine Information Center, fought to

protect the rights of families and to insert vaccine safety provisions in the

law such as mandatory reporting and recording of vaccine reactions by

physicians. Federal health officials opposed the legislation to the very end,

maintaining that vaccines have no substantial risks and that those children who

are

injured or die following vaccination are, in effect, genetically defective

and would have died or been disabled even if no vaccinations had been given.

 

In 1986, President Reagan signed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act

into law (PL99-660), giving historic societal acknowledgement that vaccines

can injure and kill individuals and creating a federal vaccine injury

compensation system. Since 1993, federal health officials under Department of

Health

and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Donna Shalala have moved to systematically

gut the law and fight every claim with the help of Department of Justice

lawyers. Today, three out of four vaccine injured children are turned away, and

more than $1 billion sits idle in the vaccine injury trust fund created by a

small surcharge or " user fee " charged to parents for each state mandated

vaccine their children receive.

 

Therefore, since 1986 the vaccine manufacturers and physicians administering

vaccines have been absolved of liability for their products and actions with

regard to selling and administering mandated vaccines to children. When the

FDA licenses a new vaccine, the drug company lobbies federal health officials

at the CDC to issue a recommendation for " universal use " of the new vaccine

by all children, and after that happens, state health officials add the new

vaccine to the list of mandated vaccines. The vaccine manufacturers have a

stable, predictable yearly market for their product and no product liability.

 

Robert Wood Johnson Gets Involved in 1991

In 1991, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation created ALL KIDS COUNT, a

national program to set up electronic vaccination registry and tracking systems

to

monitor and follow-up pre-school children in order to enforce mass

vaccination. Grants totaling $9 million were given to 20 cities to set up

vaccine

tracking systems. ALL KIDS COUNT is headquartered at the Task Force for Child

Survival and Development at The Carter Center in Atlanta, from which former

President Jimmy Carter works with federal health officials to implement

government

public health initiatives both here and abroad.

 

That same year, EVERY CHILD BY TWO was co-founded by Betty Bumpers and

former First Lady Rosalyn Carter. EVERY CHILD BY TWO is a national campaign to

set

up mechanisms to vaccinate children with all government-endorsed vaccines by

age two and is funded in part by grants from vaccine manufacturers Merck,

Lederle, and Connaught.

 

1991 was also the year that the CDC recommended that all newborns be given

hepatitis B vaccine at birth before they leave the newborn nursery, even

though only about 21,000 cases of hepatitis B were reported to the CDC in all

age

groups in 1990 and even though hepatitis B is an adult disease spread through

infected blood. Although hepatitis B is primarily confined to adult high

risk groups such as IV drug users and persons with multiple sexual partners, by

1999 42 state health departments had added three doses of hepatitis B vaccine

to the mandatory vaccination list for all children attending grade school

and high school.

 

Between July 1, 1990 and October 31, 1998, there were 24,775 reports of

hepatitis B vaccine-related adverse events reports to the government, including

9,673 serious adverse events and 439 deaths. During the same time period,

there was a total of 2,424 adverse event reports, with 1,209 serious events and

73 deaths in children under age 14 who got hepatitis B vaccine alone without

any other vaccines. This means that one out of two case reports of health

problems following hepatitis B vaccination in children ends with a trip to a

hospital emergency room, a life-threatening condition, a hospitalization or

permanent disability.

 

The Clinton Administration, The National ID and Electronic Tracking Systems

Bill Clinton's election in November 1992 brought Donna Shalala, close friend

of Hillary Clinton, to Washington, D.C., as the nation's new Secretary of

Health and Human Services. (Founded in 1973, the Children's Defense Fund (CDF)

was formerly chaired by Hillary Clinton and then by Donna Shalala and is now

headed by Marian Wright Edelman. One of CDF's main goals is to register and

monitor all children in a national computerized vaccination tracking system.)

Within weeks of taking office in January 1993, Shalala announced " President

Clinton's Immunization Initiative. "

 

Hillary Clinton then moved to play a key role in the Health Care Task Force

to restructure US health care with a plan to tag every citizen with a Unique

Health Care Identifier Number and to record and track everyone's vaccination

status and personal health information from birth to death in a

government-operated electronic database. Ira Magaziner said that President

Clinton wants

to " create an integrated system with a card that everyone will get at birth. "

Although public opposition to the Unique Health Care Identifier Number,

National ID " smartcard " and a medical records tracking system eventually

scuttled

Hillary's Health Care Plan, on April 1, 1993, Senators Ted Kennedy (D-MA)

and Don Riegle (D-MI) and Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) introduced " The

Comprehensive Child Immunization Act. " A key provision in this bill directed

Secretary Shalala to " establish a national system to track the immunization

status

of children. " Information obtained on citizens could be used by government

health officials and disclosed to other third parties without the consent of

the individual or parent or guardian. The price tag to set up the electronic

surveillance database, which would track citizen's movements from state to

state, was $1.1 billion.

 

A coalition of privacy advocates formed to oppose the vaccine tracking

provisions, including the Free Congress Foundation, Eagle Forum, Family

Research

Council, National Center for Home Education, National Vaccine Information

Center, American Civil Liberties Union, Concerned Women for America,

Traditional

Values Coalition, Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist

Convention and the American Association of Christian Schools.

 

By the Fall of 1993, strong opposition from the Republicans, privacy

advocates and the pharmaceutical industry (which would be forced under the law

to

sell vaccines to the government at a lower price so children could get free

vaccines) forced modifications of the bill. The national vaccine tracking

system

was eliminated, but language was inserted authorizing $417 million in

appropriations to HHS so Shalala could work with state health officials to

establish a national network of " state registry systems to monitor the

immunization

status of all children. " The law which passed gave Shalala authority to award

federal grants to states to set up vaccine tracking systems and money to

reward states between $50 and $100 per fully immunized child, with the dollar

figure determined by the total percentage of children fully vaccinated in the

state.

 

The National (and International) Vaccine Plan Takes Shape

In 1994, the Department of Health and Human Services published The National

Vaccine Plan, which is a strategic plan for vaccinating every American child

with all existing and future government-recommended vaccines and for

positioning the US mass vaccination program within the context of a global mass

vaccination program. The Plan emphasizes that the US is a co-sponsor of the

Children's Vaccine Initiative (CVI) launched at the World Summit for Children

in

1990 in New York City to vaccinate all the world's children with existing and

future vaccines developed by drug companies. In addition to the vaccine

manufacturers, funding for CVI is provided by the United Nation's Children's

Fund

(UNICEF), the United Nation's Development Program (UNDP), the Rockefeller

Foundation, the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO).

 

Shalala Appropriates Social Security Numbers

On March 9, 1995, Shalala published a notice in the Federal Register of the

intent to establish a new routine use of the Social Security number. This

permits the Social Security Administration to disclose the Social Security

number of a newborn to state health department officials for public health

programs including, but not limited to, establishing public immunization

registries

with the goal of operating a national network of coordinated statewide

immunization registries. The new routine use of the Social Security number

permits

HHS to disclose information about individuals without their consent if it is

for the purpose of administering a government public health program or for

conducting medical research.

 

Teenager Is Jailed For Failure to Show Proof of Vaccination

After a policeman pulled him over for driving his mother's van with expired

license plates, a Milwaukee teenager was handcuffed, stripped and jailed

overnight in April 1996 when police discovered he had failed to show public

school or county health officials proof that he had gotten a second MMR shot.

The

busy mother of Jacob Kallas had ignored repeated court orders to provide her

son's school with proof of vaccination.

 

By 1996, parents were being charged with child medical neglect for failing

to vaccinate their children with all government-recommended vaccines. Since

1982, six states have abolished philosophical or personal belief exemption to

vaccination, leaving only 15 states with this right. All states still provide

for medical exemption (which must be written by an M.D. or D.O.), and all but

two allow an exemption for sincerely held religious beliefs.

 

However, in July 1999, CDC officials mounted an assault to counter

parent-led informed consent legislative initiatives in Texas, Illinois, New

Jersey,

Massachusetts and other states in the past few years. An article was published

in the Journal of the American Medical Association criticizing parents who

claim philosophical or religious exemptions to vaccination for their children

as a potential disease threat to other unvaccinated persons as well as to

vaccinated persons for whom the vaccines have failed to work. Attaching a new

label to those who take exemptions to vaccination ( " exemptors " ), the federal

health officials said " Persons who claim philosophical and/or religious

exemptions may create some risk to the community because unvaccinated or

undervaccinated persons may be a source of transmission…. Exemptors also pose

a social

equity issue. "

 

Addressing the issue of religious exemption to vaccination, CDC officials

suggest that more stringent screening standards for proving the quality and

sincerity of religious beliefs must be applied when government officials review

a religious exemption to vaccination for acceptability.

 

Some states require an unequivocal statement from a religious leader that

immunization conflicts with the person's religious belief. This type of

requirement for an exemption essentially assesses the strength of conviction of

the

individual applying for an exemption, similar to Selective Service boards

assessing exemptions from the military draft. Other states grant exemption

based

on a form signed by parents, indicating that immunizations are against the

individual's personal belief. In these states, efforts may not be made to

assess strength of conviction.

 

They conclude by signaling that government health officials will be taking

an even more aggressive and intrusive approach to forcing vaccination in the

future, employing " interventions " to persuade exemptors to become vaccinators.

 

Having determined that exemptors are a risk factor for contracting a VPD

(Vaccine Preventable Disease), it is important to discover the underlying

reasons why individuals are claiming exemptions. Interventions should be

developed

and implemented to counter misunderstanding of the relative risks and

benefits of immunization at both the individual and societal level.

 

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (PL 104-191)

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996,

also known as the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill, further reinforced the

government-operated electronic surveillance and tracking mechanism for

monitoring every

American's medical records, using vaccination as the vehicle. Uniform

electronic

data element, collection and exchange standards were adopted. HIPAA also

resurrected the Unique Health Care Identifier Number. Officials operating the

National Immunization Program and HHS were pleased with HIPAA and stated:

" Any standards…should support the ability of health care workers and public

health officials to access appropriately specific and precise health data. "

" A current recommendation is for the first dose of hepatitis B vaccine to be

given at birth. To record this first vaccination, when it is given in the

hospital nursery and to support its ultimate linkage with the immunization

registry, either the New Unique Health Care Identifier would have to be

assigned

expeditiously within a few hours of a request, or a temporary ID number that

would ultimately link to the definitive identifier would be needed. "

" We see entries in the immunization registries as a small part of what could

ultimately develop into more comprehensive clinical and preventive

databases. "

" State laws intended to ensure privacy have presented barriers to

immunization registries in some areas. Preemptive federal legislation is needed

to

ensure appropriate privacy while allowing participation in registries that

protect the public by reducing disease. It is not clear that signed consent by

the

patient is necessary…. "

 

Shalala Will Decide Privacy Rights If Congress Does Not Meet Deadline

HIPAA provided that, if Congress does not enact legislation to create

standards to protect individually identifiable health information in medical

records by August 21, 1999, then the Secretary of HHS is required to establish

rules governing how much information the government and other third parties can

get out of private medical records by February 21, 2000. Currently, there are

four medical privacy bills in the House and Senate, including the Health Care

Personal Information Nondisclosure Act of 1999 (S.578-Senators

Jeffords/Dodd); the Medical Information Protection Act of 1999 (S.881-Senator

Bob Bennett)

and the Medical Information Privacy and Security Act (S.573/H.R.

1057-Leahy/Kennedy).

 

All of these medical " privacy " bills allow extensive exemptions for

unrestricted access and use of personal medical information in an individual's

medical records by anyone who invokes a right to access and use this

information in

the name of the public health including government officials, researchers

and law enforcement officers. Citizens can be enrolled without their informed

consent as research subjects in medical experiments if researchers make the

case that the study will contribute to the public health.

 

This means that, without the individual's informed consent, researchers

working with government, industry and private physicians will be allowed

unrestricted access to personal medical records for the purpose of enrolling

unsuspecting patients in medical research experiments. Scientific researchers

of the

future could experiment on citizens with new drugs and vaccines. The elderly

will not know whether the nursing home doctor urging the use of a new

antidepressant or the family pediatrician recommending to a mother that her

infant

get 15 vaccines in one day, is making that recommendation because it is in the

best interest of the individual or because the doctor has enrolled his

patients in a government-endorsed medical experiment.

 

Conclusion

The government push for a national ID and national electronic medical

records database originated with the desire by government and industry to find

an

institutional mechanism to enforce mandatory vaccination. The linking of state

vaccine tracking registries to a national medical records database operated

by government can be used not just to enforce vaccination but also to limit

health care choices and impose economic and other sanctions on those who do

not conform to any government health policy.

 

Children are already being denied an education and being turned down for

health insurance by HMOs for failing to be vaccinated with all government

recommended vaccines. Vaccination status is being linked to government

entitlement

programs, and there have been suggestions by legislators at both the state

and federal levels to make the obtaining of a child tax deduction dependent

upon compliance with vaccination laws.

 

Being tagged and tracked in a government-operated electronic surveillance

database could lead to severe economic and other government-sanctioned

punishments at the hands of health officials assigned police powers to " protect

the

public health. " Citizens who do not, for example, comply with government

mandates to use an AIDS vaccine when it is brought to market in the future

could

effectively be prevented from functioning in society by being denied an

education, health insurance, a driver's license, employment or even admission

to a

hospital, hotel or airplane.

The erosion of medical freedom, privacy and the right to self determination

under the guise of protecting the public health is a threat to individual

liberty and the very foundation of freedom as we have known it since the

Constitution was ratified in 1787 and amended by the Bill of Rights in 1791. A

de

facto medical dictatorship, which has been set up by government health

officials using police powers assigned by state legislatures, affirmed by the

Supreme

Court in Jacobsen v Massachusetts, fueled by federal funds, and aided by

politicians eager to control the people " for the greater good, " is destroying

the most sacred of all individual freedoms: the human right to choose what one

is willing to die for or, in the case of a parent, what one is willing to risk

a child's life for.

 

If the state can tag, track down and force citizens against their will to be

injected with biologicals of unknown toxicity today, then there will be no

limit on what individual freedoms the state can take away in the name of the

greater good tomorrow. It is time for Americans to call a halt to the immoral

use of utilitarianism by government officials to justify and enforce public

policy and to reclaim our right to freely and privately choose the kind of

health care we want for ourselves and our families.

 

Barbara Loe Fisher is co-founder and president of the National Vaccine

Information Center, a non-profit educational organization in Vienna, VA founded

in

1982. For more information, go to www.NVIC.org or call 703-938-0342.

 

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Arras JD, Steinbock B. " Moral Reasoning in the Medical Context. " In: Arras

JD, Steinbock, eds. Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine. Mountain View: Mayfield

Publishing Co; 1995: 1-39.

Barondess J. " Medicine Against Society: Lessons from the Third Reich. " JAMA.

1996; 276: 1657-1661.

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