Mark Blaxill: Vaccine mandates are bad policies based on false premises

Below is Mark Blaxill's testimony to the Public Health Committee in Massachusetts last Tuesday. Despite a snowstorm that delayed proceedings, more than 600 people attended to voice their opposition to bills including the "Community immunity act."  The "day" ended after midnight on Wednesday, such is the dedication of the Health Choice community.

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Vaccine mandates are bad policies based on false premises

My name is Mark Blaxill. I’m a co-founder of Health Choice 4 Action and the Canary Party. A graduate of Princeton and the Harvard Business School. I lived in Boston and Cambridge for close to 40 years, much of it working for The Boston Consulting Group where I was a Senior Vice President and leader of the Strategy Practice. I’ve written four books, published numerous scientific papers and represented the autism parent community on a range of government panels. Depending on who you talk to, I’m either a stealth representative of the “controlled opposition” or a dangerous “anti-vaxxer” and a serious threat to the public health.

The truth? I’m neither of the above. What I am is the parent of a beautiful 24-year-old daughter who I believe to be vaccine injured. I became an advocate because I want to prevent what happened to her from happening to others.

As an experienced business analyst, I want to highlight one critical point today: there is a great deal of money in the vaccine business. Last year, four companies—Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi and Pfizer- generated $26B in vaccine revenue, with profits just under $10B. That’s after deducting marketing, lobbying and R&D expenses. That many billions of dollars go a long way. They pay for TV ads, for lobbyists, for PR campaigns and a great deal of influence, including (and especially) with medical organizations.  And back in 1986, they pushed for and passed federal legislation that exempts vaccine makers from any liability for vaccine injury.

Back them, no one saw what was coming. Now it’s more clear. It’s not enough for pharma to simply protect DTP, MMR and polio vaccines. Now they need the vaccine business to grow. For stock prices to rise. And for opposition to be squelched. But there’s a problem with their growth ambitions: as the program has multiplied, concerns have grown. And what’s the response? Certainly not what it should be, which is more and better science on vaccine safety.

Instead, there is a new PR strategy by vaccine promoters to weaponize measles outbreaks and to pursue a newly aggressive program of vaccine mandates. These mandates are bad policies based on false premises.

Think about how cynical this PR campaign is. If you were really worried about measles, you’d develop targeted health policies focused on measles and measles alone. Instead we’ve seen broad attacks on the basic human right of free, prior and informed consent. We are using fear to raise Merck’s stock price and force parents to accept the entire, liability-free vaccine program, not just measles vaccines. Measles outbreaks are the Trojan Horse the medical industry is using to sell the newly bloated vaccination schedule, an uncontrolled experiment performed on a generation of children.

Massachusetts should provide broader exemption rights, not more mandates. Massachusetts parents have valid concerns about health policies affecting our children, which are failing on a wide scale, with  terrible outcomes along multiple dimensions.

  • The CDC’s bloated, liability-free vaccine schedule has exploded in the absence of any public health emergency and proper safety science
  • Both individual vaccines and the newly expanded vaccine program have never been tested for safety against a valid control, whether it’s (for individual vaccines) an inert saline placebo or (for the new schedule) alternative schedules, including no vaccination at all
  • Over 50% of children (in a 2007 survey) have a diagnosed chronic health condition[1] and nearly 3% (in a 2017 survey) have an autism diagnosis[2]
  • 20% of emergency room visits for children under 5 are due to an adverse reaction to a vaccine[3]
  • We now have among the worst infant mortality results of any developed nation

In short, whatever we’re doing to our children, it’s failing miserably. Something new and terrible has happened to a generation of children.

Some of the lobbyists and bill sponsors would like you to believe that advocates like me are peddling “misinformation” based on “junk science” and “discredited conspiracy theories.” Those are the pharmaceutical industry talking points and we need to recognize them as such.

We can do better. We need to restore a spirit of civil debate to these issues based on evidence, science, and respect for human rights. We need to take financial interests out of public health and mandates out of medicine.

Mark Blaxill

Co-Founder, The Canary Party, Health Choice, Health Choice 4 Action

Author, The Age of Autism, Vaccines 2.0 and Denial

[1] Bethell CD, Kogan MD, Strickland BB, Schor EL, Robertson J, Newacheck PW. A national and state profile of leading health problems and health care quality for US children: key insurance disparities and across-state variations. Acad Pediatr. 2011 May-Jun;11(3 Suppl):S22-33

[2] Zablotsky B, Black LI, Blumberg SJ. Estimated Prevalence of Children With Diagnosed Developmental Disabilities in the United States, 2014-2016. NCHS Data Brief. 2017 Nov;(291):1-8

[3] Shehab N, Lovegrove MC, Geller AI, Rose KO, Weidle NJ, Budnitz DS. US Emergency Department Visits for Outpatient Adverse Drug Events, 2013-2014. JAMA. 2016 Nov 22;316(20):2115-2125.

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By Mark Blaxill

Co-author of The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-made Epidemic, published in 2010 by Thomas Dunne Books.

(Source: ageofautism.com; December 8, 2019; http://bit.ly/2sXzyiO)
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