My Testimony to the Maine Legislature on Two Informed Consent Vaccine Bills

This week I have written about my experience testifying before the Maine Legislature's Joint Standing Committee on Health and Human Services and my exchanges with another State Representative who testified in opposition to the bills that I was supporting.

The bills are:
LD 694 (HP 523) "An Act To Encourage Transparency in Disclosing the Ingredients in Vaccinations for Children to Parents and Guardians" Sponsored by Representative Andrea Boland, that would make doctors tell patients the ingredients of a vaccine before administering it to them, just like food.

And

LD 941 (SP 287) "An Act To Prohibit Mandatory Immunizations" Sponsored by Senator Douglas Thomas, which would simply state that no one could force a Mainer to be vaccinated against their wishes.

I had heard about the hearing some what last minute and was not able to prepare written testimony before hand, but submitted it today.

I am linking to the documents here so that they may be reviewed by the public.

I encourage Mainers to get involved in supporting these common sense measures to protect the human rights of those in our state. You can contact the committee here to offer your support and testimony.

Further, I encourage Mainers who want to be able to know what is in a vaccine, and preserve the right to say no to a vaccine if they so choose, to let their voice be heard over at the Portland Press Herald who has come out in support of removing your right for you to decide what goes into your body and what goes in the body of your children in an op ed piece.

I am posting my cover page to the testimony, and will link to the actual documents in the body of it below. While I submitted two chapters of our book Vaccine Epidemic, I will not be posting those, as I am sure that our publisher would not be pleased, so if you have not done so, please consider buying the book.

Written testimony by Ginger Taylor M.S. to the Maine Joint Standing Committee on Health and Human Services

In support of: LD 694 (HP 523) "An Act To Encourage Transparency in Disclosing the Ingredients in Vaccinations for Children to Parents and Guardians" Sponsored by Representative Andrea Boland, and LD 941 (SP 287) "An Act To Prohibit Mandatory Immunizations" Sponsored by Senator Douglas Thomas


My name is Ginger Taylor and I am resident of Brunswick. I hold a BS in Psychology with a concentration in child development and an MS in Clinical Counseling from Johns Hopkins University with a concentration if adolescent and family therapy. I am a co-author and contributing editor on the new book, “Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children,” which makes the argument that informed consent in vaccination is a fundamental human right. I served on the steering committee for the 2009 Maine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Autism Conference to educate medical professionals on the current state of the research and treatment of Autism. I am the founder of Greater Brunswick Special Families, but most significant to these proceedings, I am the mother of a child who regressed into autism following the simultaneous administration of the DTaP, Hepatitis B, Polio, HIB and Pnumo vaccines. When I discovered that none of the vaccines My son received that day had been studied for their relationship to autism, and that my pediatrician’s opinion that his vaccines did not cause his autism had no basis in science, I began to investigate and document the vaccine-autism causation theory and other vaccine injuries.

My thanks to the committee for indulging my impromptu oral testimony on these bills and for allowing me to submit further written testimony on these matters.

Drastic changes have taken place in the vaccine program since I was a child growing up in the 1970s and 1980s and when vaccination is discussed most people’s frame of reference on vaccination was their own experience growing up. Vaccination has gone from a tool used to protect the health of individuals and to prevent deadly epidemics, to an over aggressive, under researched, one size fits all program to eradicate disease, even at the expense of individual patients. At the heart of this phenomenon is the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act that granted liability protection to everyone involved in vaccination from the manufacturer who makes it to the public health official that recommends or mandates it to the school system that requires it and even to the doctors and nurses who administer any FDA approved vaccine regardless of the damage or death of the child or adult being vaccinated.

Because of this, over the last quarter century the vaccine program has changed drastically. Pharmaceutical companies realized what a cash cow they had on their hands when suddenly they had a product line that the government could require people to buy, and that Pharma could not be sued for. They began pouring funds into vaccine research and development and only a few short years after the act was passed, began adding new and more cheaply made vaccines to the market, and using their considerable political influence to get CDC to recommend these vaccines and states to require their purchase and administration for school entrance.

As a result the vaccine schedule has ballooned to three times its previous size, and vaccines have become a 27 billion dollar a year industry.

Children born between the mid 1960s and the mid 1980s were subject to a childhood vaccine schedule that recommended between 24 and 25 doses of vaccine (depending on whether or not they received the small pox vaccine that was discontinued in the early 1970s.) Children born today are subject to a vaccine schedule that has just had its 70th dose of vaccine added to it as of late 2010.

A child born today, if vaccinated according to the CDC recommended schedule will receive more doses of vaccine by the time he is six months old than his mother did by the time she went to college. Unlike his mother, his vaccines will begin with in hours of his birth, before he has even established a health history which can be used to evaluate whether or not a particular vaccine is safe for him.

Disturbingly, there is not one study to investigate what this aggressive vaccine schedule may do to a child and there is no safety testing of vaccines in the combinations which are recommended on the infant schedule. For example, at two months old babies are vaccinated for Diphtheria, Tetanus, Pertussis, Hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type b, Polio, Rotavirus and Pneumococcal, and there is no study to find out if this is a safe practice or what long term health problems it may lead to.

Further, CDC now has an adult vaccine schedule, and if the schedule is followed to the letter by someone living the average life span of 78 years, they will receive 167 doses of vaccine.

Aggressive insistence from the vaccine injury and vaccine safety community has yielded almost no results in requiring improved safety research and accurate risk information, rather the medical community labels all vaccine safety advocates as “anti-vaccine” and demonizes them in the press. Ironically this includes parents who continue to vaccinate their children, and even doctors who administer and advocate for vaccination, but publicly state that they do cause autism and other adverse reactions. The most recent example of this was Bill Gates appearing on CNN last month and insisting that parents who assert that vaccines can cause autism, as I am asserting to you today, are “child killers.” This is analogous to calling those who advocate for safer infant car seats and accurate product safety information, “baby killers.”

My personal appeals to the Maine CDC under the previous administration to conduct reviews of vaccine safety information and recommendations offered to Maine by the federal government on vaccine policy before adopting them have been rebuffed. As a result, Maine vaccine policy is for all practical purposes, set by a panel of only 16 people at the CDC in Atlanta on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, who bear no burden if the policy they set is errant. Instead, Maine bears almost all the cost of these flawed decisions via medical expenses, HHS, special education programs, Maine Care, law enforcement agencies and individuals and families like mine paying for the consequences of inappropriate vaccination.

There are no checks and balances in the vaccine program, and the costs of damages roll down hill from the CDC to ME to me.

The dangers of adopting the policies of the federal government on vaccine policy are most clearly highlighted during the H1N1 scare generated by Atlanta, who declared an epidemic, declared a state of emergency, activated their emergency powers, rushed an inadequately tested vaccine to market, held out the option to FORCE administration of that vaccine, and spent several billion dollars for what turned out to be the mildest flu season on record. This despite the very low uptake of the flu vaccine, as the public did not buy the hype.

Further, we had ample evidence that the H1N1 flu was no serious threat to the American people, as it was not causing problems in the southern hemisphere during their flu season in their winter (our summer) of 2009. Yet despite the evidence that this flu was actually a very weak one, CDC continued to sound a false alarm for the entire 2009 – 2010 flu season.

Neither Kathleen Sebelius nor any public official involved lost their jobs over the debacle, no investigation was launched and CDC continued to attempt to push the H1N1 scare into the following flu season.

I submit to you that the vaccine program has become a run away train that abuses its power and the trust of the public, asserts safety and efficacy claims that are not supported by the science and that there is no way for the public to challenge bad vaccine policy under current US law.

Because of this it is imperative for the legislature of the State of Maine to protect the rights of Mainers to Informed Consent in vaccination.

We must have the right to all known information about any vaccine that we may be considering for administration, and if we believe that it is not a wise health choice for ourselves and our children, then we must be allowed exercise our fundamental human right to decline a vaccine.

These two measures are reasonable protection of my rights as a citizen and a mother, and I hope you will consider the information that I am presenting to you and support these measures.

Supporting arguments:

1. Why These Laws are Needed
a. The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act
b. Vaccination Choice is a Fundamental Human Right
2. A Review of Vaccine Safety Claims
a. IOM Vaccine Safety Review Bibliography Additions
b. Evidence that vaccines can cause autism
c. The Dangers of Mercury in the H1N1 Vaccine
3. Informed Consent: HHS states that vaccines DO cause autism
a. HHS, HRSA, Vaccine Injury Compensation Table
b. Julie Gerberding Admits on CNN that Vaccines Can Cause Autism
4. An Evaluation of the Trustworthiness of Federal Public Health Assertions
a. The Role of Government and Media
5. Additional Comments

In closing, it is my opinion and experience that the majority of the medical community is employing the Semmelweiss Reflex and in denial about the true incidence of serious vaccine adverse reactions; and it is unwilling to look at the evidence to this effect. I have included a discussion of the Semmelweiss Reflex in my chapter in Vaccine Epidemic on the Role of Government and Media, and hope you will pay particular attention to it.

No doctor gets into this difficult profession in order to harm patients, and facing the fact that a practice that they are employing to make people better is many cases causing more harm than good, is not something that they have demonstrated that they are willing to do.

In light of this, I believe it is the responsibility of this committee to look at this topic in a fresh light, look at testimony of health officials, organizations and physicians with a critical eye, and make them actually prove their case. It is my belief that most of them do not know they are providing false information. Avoidable vaccine damage continues because state and federal legislators are taking the unsupported claims of these parties at face value and not forcing them under oath to address the challenges of vaccine safety and choice advocates.

Further I encourage the committee to consider formal hearings on the evidence that I have in included in my testimony and that we have compiled in Vaccine Epidemic and several other books published on the subject of vaccines and their component parts.

I thank the members of the committee and appreciate the thoughtful way in which these hearings have been carried out thus far. I will be happy to be at your disposal in providing any further information you may need to carry out your responsibilities on these matters.