Jun
Parents Say “No” to More Vaccines
BY HEATHER SENISON
Legislative Gazette Staff Writer
Mon, Jun 16, 2008
A hundred angry parents traveled from across the state last week to protest a bill that would add to the list of mandatory vaccinations and to demand the right to refuse immunizations for their children on philosophical or medical grounds.
The parents, joined by Assemblyman Marc Alessi, D-Manor Park, held signs displaying phrases such as “trust what God gave you, your immune system works,” and “parental choice vs. corporate profit,” while shouting “my kids, my choice.”
They were rallying against legislation A.10942, a program bill sponsored by the Assembly Rules Committee and currently being reviewed by the Health Committee, which would add to the list of mandatory vaccinations for New York’s children, to include meningococcal and other diseases.
The bill would also permit the administration of vaccinations for sexually transmitted infections to minors without parental consent, require certain health care workers to get the flu vaccine and have the state follow national standards for vaccinations in the future.
“I think it should be the parents’ choice, not the state’s, to vaccinate their children,” Alessi said at the rally.
“Why do you vaccinate a 6-year-old girl for a disease that she [might] get 10 years from now?” Alessi asked. “What we’re saying is, these are medical decisions that should be made by the individual, or the parent of a minor, and the state’s making it for them.
“We have 30 vaccines now,” Alessi said. “They want to protect children from diseases that you get from sexual activity. Maybe we’ve gone too far, and we should have a dialogue and look at the safety of all these 30 vaccines,” he said. Alessi said he agreed to have his own children vaccinated.
Alessi is sponsoring bill A.5468, which, according to the bill’s text, would allow parents to refrain from vaccinating their children due to philosophical reasons. The bill is also sponsored by Sen. Frank Padavan, R,C-Bellerose.
“There are studies out there that indicate that these vaccines are not all that efficacious, that the states that have philosophical exemptions have no outbreaks, states that don’t have philosophical exemptions do, so the data doesn’t correlate with the assertions from the industry,” Alessi said.
He said that among the states that do have philosophical exemptions in place are some of the most populated in the country, such as Texas and California.
Alessi cited the state of Iowa, which does not have a philosophical exemption law but still had a serious mumps outbreak in 2005.
Padavan sponsors another piece of legislation the parents were rallying in favor of, A.3180. This bill, sponsored in the Assembly by Health Committee Chairman Richard Gottfreid, D,WF-Manhattan, would allow children to be exempt from vaccinations for medical reasons.
This bill is closely linked with the debate over thimerosal, a preservative that until recently, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, was an ingredient in most vaccines. According to the FDA, thimerosal by weight is 50 percent mercury, a highly toxic chemical.
Thimerosal has been considered to be a contributing factor to autism among young children. Autism is a neurological disorder that develops in children before the age of 3 and affects their communication and social interaction behavior.
A mother at the rally, Lisa Rudley of Briarcliff Manor, Westchester County, said her 6-year-old son was diagnosed with autism at 2 months, after he received his influenza vaccination.
Rudley said her son’s condition worsened with every vaccination he received, but the “final shot, the flu shot, is what did him in.”
Rudley said there is no scientific proof that the vaccinations caused her son’s autism, but, she said, “as a parent I knew.
“After he got the flu shot, he started screaming, got hallucinations,” she said.
Rudley said although the flu shot wasn’t mandatory, her doctor recommended she immunize her son.
Rudley said she is currently in vaccine court, where she is suing the doctor for encouraging her to make a decision that she said caused her son physical harm.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Web site, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to, among other things, “establish and maintain an accessible and efficient forum for individuals found to be injured by certain vaccines.” As an alterative to having vaccine-injury cases resolved through traditional law suits, the act put the U. S. Court of Federal Claims in change of deciding who should be compensated, and it has come to be known as the “vaccine court.”
Michael Smith, director of the northeast region of the Foundation for Autism Information and Research, said that although thimerosal has been removed from many vaccinations, “there are still 11 vaccines on the schedule that contain mercury.”
According to the FDA, some manufacturers of the influenza vaccination still include 0.01 percent of thimerosal in their shots.
“It’s too toxic to flush it down the toilet, but it’s OK to inject it into our children,” Smith said. “It’s a personal freedoms issue and these people down here are ill-equipped to make these decisions.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Health sponsor an Immunization Safety Review Committee within the Institute of Medicine. The committee has 14 members who met several times between 2001 and 2004 to study vaccine safety.
In its most recent study, released in 2004, the committee reported that, “Currently, thimerosal has been removed from all universally recommended childhood vaccines except influenza vaccine. A thimerosal-free version of the influenza vaccine exists, however, and is available for use in infants, children and pregnant women.
“The hypothesis that vaccines, specifically MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and the preservative thimerosal, cause autism is among the most contentious of issues reviewed by vaccine safety committees of the [Institute of Medicine],” the committee reported.
“One needs to read just one of the many Web sites and Internet-based discussion groups on the issue of autism to get a picture of the complicated lives of families with children with autism and the anger of some families toward the federal government,” the report states.
Though the committee reported that, based on the evidence reviewed, while it “strongly supports targeted research that focuses on better understanding the disease of autism, from a public health perspective the committee does not consider a significant investment in studies of the theoretical vaccine-autism connection to be useful at this time.”
The committee reported that it does support funding be awarded to pay for further research into autism.
Also in the package of bills the advocates at last week’s rally support is A.3064/S.1563, also sponsored by Padavan and Gottfried.
Under state health law, some religious beliefs qualify for exemptions from mandatory vaccinations. However, a school may veto parents’ decisions to not vaccinate their children.
The legislation would protect parents from what the bill memo describes as “inappropriate and intrusive inquiry into their religious beliefs” from the school once they submit an affidavit indicating they hold genuine religious beliefs that will not allow them to immunize their children.
