Mandatory Vaccination
Below is my reply to Tommy Marron, MidWest Radio who had read the letter promoting mandatory vaccination printed in the Irish Independent. My reply was subsequently read on air.
Hello Tommy (18.1.2012)
two weeks ago you read on your show a letter to the editor of the Irish Independent from a doctor Aidan Hampson who suggested that doctors should be allowed to mandatorily vaccinate children. You did not question the lack of ethics in his request. Surely the day has come when we can no longer assume we can do what we like to children, particularly without parents’ consent. (If he really cares about children, as he says, he should take up the same paper and read the article the following week about GlaxoSmithKline being fined for unethically testing vaccines on poor children in Argentina see here).
He also claimed that the few children in a class not vaccinated were a threat to those who are vaccinated. You didn’t question his poor logic. Surely, if vaccines work then the children who are vaccinated have no chance of being infected by the unvaccinated children?
He also makes the bizarre claim that “Vaccines nowadays (whenever “nowadays” began!) have no side effects.” No doctor in their right mind would make such a claim. Two days after his letter the Irish Times had an article informing us that there were 500 reported adverse reactions in teenagers to the cervical cancer jab. This contradicts Dr Hampson and when you consider that not every teenage girl will go back to a doctor to complain and of those who do, not every doctor will pass on every reaction (just 10% are reported by G.P.s according to U.S. research), you can be sure there are far more than 500 reactions. Also, some reactions are missed because they don’t happen for weeks so we have to infer that there were far more than 500 adverse reactions to the cervical cancer vaccine.
Also, the week before his letter, the Daily Telegraph pointed out that the government of Finland has just paid compensation to victims of the swine flu jab. We can only conclude Dr Hampson is very naive and wrong; vaccines do have side-effects. As one doctor commented, “Even milk injected into the blood stream is toxic.”
But Dr Hampson also assumes vaccines work. Only three days after his letter, the Daily Telegraph reported a whooping cough epidemic in Britain, even though the authorities were “Very satisfied with the level of vaccine uptake.”! In other words, the epidemic has run its usual 3-4 year cycle despite the successful vaccine programme.
In the summer before last we also witnessed the failure of vaccination among third level students here in Ireland when we had a huge epidemic of mumps-in a generation who were vaccinated with the MMR. We were deluded into thinking the vaccine would protect us.
I wonder whether Dr Hampson’s real issue is about power, power based on false premises.
However there remains a serious but unspoken issue with vaccines which must be addressed. Twelve years ago news broke in Britain that the manufacturer of one of the children’s vaccines, Merck, had for 11 years flouted the government’s guidelines on the manufacture of vaccines. They used bovine spinal tissue to grow the virus for the vaccine. Consequently, some of those vaccines – which were also used in Ireland – were infected with CJD (mad cow disease) meaning we have a generation of Irish children infected with CJD. The department of health at the time here notified some parents and not others. No advice was given, no counselling was given to the parents and certainly no compensation to the children. This remains a worry for the parents who trusted the likes of Dr Hampson; maybe Dr Hampson will take up their cause..?
I may be an old crank or “odd” but one thing is for sure Tommy; I won’t be entrusting my child to Dr Hampson, Glaxo or Merck. Ends
Rome Replies
Since then, Italy and Germany have introduced mandatory vaccination for schoolchildren. This sinister development smacks of totalitarianism. In Italy, a canon lawyer has written a letter on behalf of children refused admission to school without being vaccinated. The letter is as follows:
To Whom It May Concern:
It has just come to my attention that a child has been expelled from a Catholic educational institution for reasons of non-conformity to a diocesan policy of denying State-allowed religious exemptions. The vaccines in question are propagated on aborted fetal cell lines. This is a violation of the Catholic Church’s centuries-old teaching on the supremacy of the Moral Conscience and the right of parents to preside over the total wellbeing of their children.
I can attest personally that this issue is presently under consideration by various offices of the Vatican concerned with the doctrinal and moral aspects of this complex issue. Pending a final judgment on this issue the parental right of conscience is to be considered the binding authority in this matter and the child should not be penalized for non-conformity to a policy which is not defined as Church doctrine or practice.
As Executive Director of Human Life International’s office in Rome, I have been a strong advocate of parental rights in these cases, and I have personally attended meetings of the Pontifical Academy for Life in Rome which has considered this issue carefully for the past several years. Due to recent changes in the Vatican hierarchy we remain hopeful that a definitive decision on the issue of vaccines will be given this year. In the meantime I attach for your consideration some quotes from official Church documents which clearly spell out the supremacy of the parental right of conscience in this matter.
Sincerely,
Mons. Ignacio Barreiro
Executive Director
The Church documents are as follows:
Code of Canon Law
Christ’s faithful are to strive to secure that in the civil society the laws which regulate the formation of the young, also provide a religious and moral education in the schools that is in accord with the conscience of the parents. (c. 799)Parents have the most grave obligation and the primary right to do all in their power to ensure their children’s physical, social, cultural, moral and religious upbringing. (c.1136)
Pope John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, n. 40: “The parents have been appointed by God Himself as the first and principal educators of their children…their right is completely inalienable”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, on Parental Duty and Moral Conscience
The fecundity of conjugal love cannot be reduced solely to the procreation of children, but must extend to their moral education and their spiritual formation. “The role of parents in education is of such importance that it is almost impossible to provide an adequate substitute.” The right and the duty of parents to educate their children are primordial and inalienable. (CCC 2221)Man has the right to act in conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions. He must not be forced to act contrary to his conscience. Nor must he be prevented from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters. (CCC 1782)
Update
July 2015: Former Merck Rep Says Mandatory Vaccination Is For Profit and Not Public Health
May 2017: Sweden Bans Mandatory Vaccinations Over ‘Serious Health Concerns’ Link
April 2019: further to the German state of Brandenburg introducing mandatory vaccination, along with Italy and New York State (following an epidemic of measles in NY), Irish Minister for Health Simon Harris has stated he is in favour of enforcing the injection of foreign proteins into infants and children, Dr Richard Moskowitz, M.D. (biochemistry, Harvard and philosophy, Columbia), in an unpublished comment, states:
Rather than simply accepting the fact that vaccines have at best a partial and limited efficacy, we are allowing the CDC and the drug industry to play on our fears to the extent of inflating these small, localized outbreaks of measles into the dreaded semblance of a looming public-health emergency, posing a serious threat to society, justifying forced vaccination of everyone, even against their will if necessary, and thereby nullifying our co-authorship of and continuing allegiance to the Nuremberg Code of Human Rights and the Helsinki Declaration governing Biomedical Research, both of which insist upon the right of every patient and every experimental subject to give informed consent to all medical and surgical procedures, and explicitly forbid administering them by force.10
10. World Medical Association, Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects, Helsinki, 1964, amended 2008, par. 24, p. 3.
Isn’t it ironic, the reason for this code of ethics is thanks to the German state’s enforced and punitive medical regime during the Nazi years?
Afterword
When someone becomes infected with a disease for which there is a vaccine, the naïve jump on the unthinking bandwagon and assume they had been vaccinated. They never ask the rational question: were they vaccinated?
In 2015, a lady in the US died from measles. Again the great and the good assumed she had not been vaccinated; she had. Read a critique of the measles vaccine and this particular case in the prestigious Foreign Policy journal: “A Measles Death, Vaccines, and the Media’s Failure to Inform: There is a discussion to be had about public vaccine policy. The media ought to start having it”, by Jeremy R. Hammond (July 5, 2015) Click here for link
On Paxil (Seroxat), the BMJ has just revisited an old study – and shows it was flawed: Restoring Study 329
Update Dec 2015
HIQA says stopping the BCG vaccination programme would avoid “unnecessary side effects.” Link
The BCG is ineffective anyway says expert link