Every Monday, we let two readers tackle a topic of the day. This week, the topic is mandatory vaccinations — something made all the more timely by some reported cases of measles in the north valley. Our editorial stance has been consistently clear: vaccinations must be mandatory. But, we do welcome other points of view on this page, and we have a “Con” argument presented today by Scott Borges, who has a pharmacy degree, worked as a pharmacist for 40 years and was a longtime believer in vaccinations. Scott Paulo takes on the “Pro” side.
PRO / Scott Paulo
Parents’ foremost responsibility is to provide for their children: to provide food, clothes, and shelter, and to keep them safe.
Unfortunately, some parents are unwilling or unable to provide these basic needs, and that’s where the government is obligated to step in on the children’s behalf. This intervention can be through programs such as Medicaid and food stamps, or through regulations such as seat belt and bicycle helmet laws … and mandatory vaccinations.
Because the undisputed truth is, vaccinations save lives. In fact, the Center for Disease Control estimates that over 21 million lives have been saved over the past 20 years, just because of measles vaccination. And most of those saved lives have belonged to children, because they’re the most vulnerable to the disease. The World Health Organization estimates that most of the 110,000 people worldwide who died of measles in 2017 were children under the age of five.
The benefits of “herd immunity” are well established, whereby unvaccinated people are unlikely to be exposed to contagious diseases if most of the people surrounding them have been immunized against those diseases. But that benefit wanes when too many people opt out of vaccination, because there are so many people who are incapable of being vaccinated: people who are allergic to the serums, people who have weakened immune systems, and children who are too young to get the vaccines.
Besides measles, younger children are also at risk for polio, rubella, and mumps until they are old enough to be vaccinated. Considering that there are about 4 million births a year in the United States, that puts a lot of infants at risk for measles, pertussis, and other vaccine-preventable diseases.
Anti-vaxxers are “free riding” off the benefits of others being vaccinated, which is selfish and frankly, shameful. Just as your right to swing your fist ends just where my nose begins, your right to opt out of vaccinations ends when it starts to endanger my infant granddaughter’s life.
Measles cases have recently been reported in Butte, Tehama, and Placer counties, including in our own backyard at the Chico State campus. The chances of a child suffering serious adverse effects from immunization are roughly one in a million. Conversely, in developed countries there are 1-3 deaths per 1,000 cases of the measles, or about 1 in 500 on average.
What kind of parent would risk those odds, when their children’s lives are at stake?
CON / Scott Borges
In 1986, due to product safety issues and mounting lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, Ronald Reagan reluctantly signed into law the National Child Vaccine Injury Act (NCVI). This act removed all liability from vaccine manufacturers. Our federal government assumed the financial liability for the pharmaceutical companies by establishing the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), funded by taxpayer money. Since 1988 the VICP has paid out more than $4 billion for vaccine injuries.
The US Supreme Court has legally defined vaccines as “unavoidably unsafe,” yet the mantra “vaccines are safe and effective” is what we are led to believe. To date, not a single true placebo based double-blind controlled study has been performed that proves the safety of vaccines. The elimination of financial liability effectively eliminated any incentive vaccine manufacturers had to produce a safer vaccine. Presumably, to counter this oversight, the 1986 NCVI act required Federal Health and Human Services (FHHS) to perform safety tests and report to Congress every two years. In 32 years the FHHS has not conducted a single safety test.
“Herd immunity” is used by politicians and pediatricians to justify mandatory vaccinations. The idea is pure nonsense. Often you’ll hear that vaccination rates must remain above a certain percentage of the population to have herd immunity. You’ll hear numbers like 90% to 95% compliance is required, yet vaccine immunity wanes, lasting often less than 10 years. As a result, if your vaccinations are not up to date, (which includes the vast majority of our adult population), you are walking around with NO immunity. If half our population has no immunity, we have never reached the “herd threshold”. So where are all the epidemics?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a for-profit agency that owns patents on 20 vaccines, makes our vaccine schedule. Can anyone see a conflict of interest? Today the CDC recommends 72 doses of 16 different vaccinations for every child between birth and 18 years old. The majority of vaccines still contain the neurotoxin aluminum and the multi-dose flu shot still contains mercury. Try adding up the amount of aluminum in 72 doses of vaccines and try to understand this is a neurotoxin that has been linked to Alzheimers, autoimmunity, brain inflammation, chronic fatigue syndrome, and cognitive dysfunction, just to name a few. Today we inject a fully vaccinated child with 4,925 mcg of aluminum.
So the question remains, do we ignore the 2005 Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights and mandate a product from an industry with a storied history of fraud and deception, that buys and pays for our elected officials, that incentivizes pediatricians to push for vaccine compliance, that has shuttled its liability to the very people forced to use its product, where no safety studies have ever been performed, a product linked to a myriad of disorders? Or do we believe in human rights and freedom of choice?
If you have a topic you’d like to cover in Pro vs. Con, email editor Mike Wolcott at mwolcott@chicoer.com. All we ask are 375-400 words. If you’d like to pick a side in this topic, let us know: “Regardless of the outcome of the Mueller Investigation, should impeachment proceedings begin against President Trump?”
