The 19th century book, A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens opens with these words:1
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair …”
He could have been describing the culture wars deconstructing social orders and threatening liberty in this and other countries around the world today. Dickens was talking about Europe just before the French Revolution, which followed the American Revolution that led to the founding of the United States of America, a coalition of independent states united in a constitutional republic that democratically elects representatives to govern the people.
Signed by the founders of the 13 original states, every year July 4 marks the Declaration of Independence from British rule by those states in 1776.2
At the National Vaccine Information Center, this July 4, 2022 we joined with people all across America in honor of those who bravely fought to make liberty a foundational value in America. This was NVIC’s 40th Independence Day.
The Risks of Vaccination Were 100 Percent
Kathi Williams, Jeff Schwartz and I were young parents in the Washington, DC area when we watched the Emmy Award winning documentary DPT: Vaccine Roulette in the spring of 1982 and banded together with other parents of vaccine injured children to establish Dissatisfied Parents Together — DPT — the charity known today as the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC).3,4
Our mission was a simple one: to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths through public education. We wanted other parents to have the information we did not have when the risks of vaccination for our children turned out to be 100 percent.
We were the first in post-World War II America to organize nationally and raise public awareness about vaccine risks and failures.5 From the beginning, it was obvious that mandatory vaccination laws were the main reason why parents were kept in the dark about vaccine reactions and why so many doctors either denied vaccines can injure and kill or insisted that — if vaccines do cause harm — a bad reaction only happens once or twice in a million doses.6
That is why the vaccine safety and informed consent movement launched in the U.S. in the last part of the 20th century has never been about one vaccine or one disease, one vaccine ingredient or one scientific hypothesis. It has always been about the right to access truthful information and the freedom to make a voluntary decision.
There is no liberty more fundamentally a natural inalienable right than the freedom to acquire knowledge and follow our conscience when choosing for what reason we are willing to risk our life or our child’s life.7
Right to Know, Freedom to Choose
This year as we mark NVIC’s 40th Anniversary, we are witnessing another inadequately tested and highly reactive vaccine, the mRNA COVID vaccine, roll out across America and be injected into babies as young as six months old — even though 75 percent of them have already had COVID.8,9
It is a vaccine that does not prevent infection, a vaccine that has already generated over one million reaction reports to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)10 that parents secured as a safety provision in the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.11
When we started this journey, we did not know that our “right to know and freedom to choose” message would stand the test of time and become even more relevant decades later, when a genetically engineered virus and vaccine would be unleashed on humanity and governments would mandate it.12
As Kathi and I look back at the road we have traveled with so many mothers and fathers, who trusted the advice of doctors and then watched their healthy children regress physically, mentally and emotionally after vaccination, we are inspired by a new generation of mothers and fathers pushing back against forced vaccination laws.
Some of them have children, who have recently joined the ranks of the vaccine injured, and others are taking action because they simply want their children and grandchildren to have a choice.
When medical historian Harris Coulter and I were conducting two years of research for our 1985 book, DPT: A Shot in the Dark,13 I learned it wasn’t just the crude old whole cell pertussis vaccine in DPT shots that was a problem. The entire mandatory vaccination system was — and still is — the problem.
Mandatory vaccination laws enslave the people and give the pharmaceutical industry a free ride all the way to the bank.
I realized then that the only way to reform public health policy and law was to defend without compromise the human right to autonomy, which is the first human right.14,15 Autonomy is the foundation for informed consent to medical risk taking that guides the ethical practice of medicine.16,17
Informed consent means you have the human right to bodily autonomy and the legal right to be fully informed about the risks and complications of a medical intervention, such as use of a pharmaceutical product, and be free to make a decision without being coerced or sanctioned by anyone for the decision you make.18,19
In the early 1980’s, doctors were giving children 23 doses of seven vaccines by age six20 — DPT, MMR and polio vaccines — but they were not telling parents that some children do not get through the process of vaccination without suffering brain injury or even dying from vaccine reactions.
Mothers taking their babies to pediatricians for routine checkups back then did not know how toxic the crude whole cell pertussis vaccine in DPT shots really was,21,22,23,24 or that a purified, less reactive version (DTaP) was already available in Japan.25
They didn’t know that the live oral polio vaccine could cause vaccine strain polio and paralyze children, and that it also could paralyze parents and anyone coming in close physical contact with the body fluids of recently vaccinated children.26,27,28
The Legal Right to Sue Negligent Doctors and Vaccine Companies
When Big Pharma threatened to leave the US with no childhood vaccines unless they were given total liability protection from vaccine injury lawsuits, we worked with Congress for four years to protect the legal right of parents to sue vaccine manufacturers and negligent doctors29 and to secure vaccine informing, reporting, recording and research provisions in the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.30
When you are handed a Vaccine Information Statement (VIS) at a pediatrician’s office during a well child visit,31 it is because we insisted that the 1986 Act require every doctor and vaccine provider to give every parent printed disease and vaccine risk information before vaccinating a child.32
We also made sure the Act would guarantee parents legal access to the name of the vaccine manufacturer and lot number, and would require doctors and all vaccine providers to report serious health problems that happen after vaccination to a centralized Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, known today as VAERS.33
The 1986 Act was historic acknowledgement by the US government that vaccine injuries and deaths are real, and that vaccine safety should be made a national priority. The federal compensation program created under the Act was designed to be an alternative to a lawsuit — not the sole remedy.
That is because in the original law we did successfully protect the legal right of parents of vaccine injured children to sue negligent doctors for medical malpractice and to sue drug companies for design defect when there was evidence the company could have made a vaccine safer.34
Congress, Medical Trade & US Supreme Court Betray the People
We never imagined that after the law was passed, Congress would do the bidding of medical trade groups like the American Medical Association (AMA) and American Academy of Pediatrics and secretly amend the law in 1987 to shield negligent doctors from liability for vaccine injuries and deaths.35
We never imagined that the US Supreme Court would betray the people in 2011 by ignoring the Act’s legislative history and take away all remaining liability from the vaccine industry — even when there is evidence a company knew how to make a vaccine less likely to cause harm but did not do it.36,37
The systematic gutting of the 1986 Act by Congress, federal agencies, and the pharmaceutical and medical trade industries is more than shameful, it is tragic.38,39,40,41 It is symbolic of the lack of compassion inherent in mandatory vaccination laws that dismiss the lives of individuals as expendable in the name of the greater good and allow vaccine vulnerable children to be written off as acceptable sacrifices.42
A Four Decade Public Record of Consumer Advocacy
Kathi and I worked with parents for 14 years to raise awareness about DPT vaccine risks and to get a purified, less toxic pertussis vaccine licensed for babies in 1996.43 Three years later, the live oral polio vaccine was finally replaced in 1999 by the killed vaccine that cannot cause vaccine strain polio.44,45
Beginning in 1988, NVIC representatives served as consumer members on the National Vaccine Advisory Committee (NVAC), Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines (ACCV), the FDA Vaccines & Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), the Institute of Medicine Vaccine Safety Forum and CDC public engagement projects to provide an informed consumer perspective and voice for the vaccine injured.46,47,48
We have spoken out at health conferences in the US, Canada and Europe and in many public forums, including testifying in Congress and state legislatures.49,50,51,52,53
We warned parents about electronic vaccine tracking systems54,55 and the risks and failures of hepatitis B,56 chickenpox,57 measles58 and rotavirus59 vaccines, as well as monkey virus contamination of polio vaccines;60 and about smallpox61,62 and anthrax63 vaccines in 2001; and about “Gardasil” HPV vaccine in 2006;64 and H1N1 swine flu vaccine in 2009;65 and, now, about the risks and failures of COVID vaccines.66,67,68
In 1995, we established NVIC’s flagship website that, at NVIC.org, is one of the oldest and largest health information websites on the Internet containing an online library of more than 2,000 pages of referenced print and video information on vaccine science, policy, law and ethics.
In the past 27 years, three more websites have been added: MedAlerts.org, a user-friendly search engine founded in 2003 and sponsored by NVIC since 2006 to provide public access to vaccine reaction reports made to VAERS;69 NVICAdvocacy.org, launched in 2010 to organize at the state level to oppose forced vaccination and protect vaccine exemptions in public health laws; and TheVaccineReaction.org, a journal newspaper first published in print form in 1995 and re-launched as a digital publication in 2015.
NVIC has a unique public record of defining and debating the vaccine safety and informed consent issue in the public square,70 especially on legacy media television71 and radio networks, in newspapers, and on websites and social media, and during the five international public conferences on vaccination we sponsored beginning in 1997.
It is a public record that government, industry, and medical trade, now partnered with Silicon Valley, have been trying to erase and end for more than two decades, and the COVID pandemic declaration was a perfect excuse to double down on that effort.72,73,74,75,76,77,78
A Pandemic Declaration That Triggered Global Censorship
After we held our 2020 Fifth International Public Conference on Vaccination: Protecting Health and Autonomy in the 21st Century, a political operative in the United Kingdom launched an internationally publicized hate campaign against NVIC making false claims and calling for the removal of our information from all social media platforms.79,80
In 2021, Big Tech corporations pressured by politicians, medical trade and allied organizations removed NVIC from all four social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, You Tube).81,82,83,84,85,86,87,88
It was a highly organized, politically motivated act of censorship against the oldest and largest organization defending informed consent to vaccination. That censorship campaign culminated in another attack a few days before Christmas suddenly blocking the ability of NVIC supporters to process donations through PayPal.89,90
This unprecedented censorship of a highly rated charitable organization, which does not make vaccine use recommendations and simply defends the informed consent principle,91 is why I have been warning since 1994 that:
If the state can tag, track down and forced individuals against their will to be injected with biologicals of known and unknown toxicity today, then there will be no limit on which individual freedoms the state will take away in the name of the greater good tomorrow.
The escalating attacks on freedom of speech and autonomy are being orchestrated by a global public health empire primarily funded by the pharmaceutical industry and governments in partnership with medical trade and influential institutions profiting from that partnership, including mass media.92,93,94,95
The public health empire has appropriated enough power in the 21st century to ruin economies and risk the physical, mental and emotional health of millions and millions of children and adults.96,97,98,99
Ground zero is the World Health Organization (WHO) headquartered at the United Nations, which in 2019 declared “vaccine hesitancy” to be among the top 10 threats to global public health.100 It was a declaration that triggered global censorship of anyone publicly criticizing vaccine safety or effectiveness.101
A year later, the WHO declared a novel coronavirus pandemic and persuaded governments to suspend civil liberties and lock people down until a COVID vaccine could be rushed to market and mandated as a condition for getting medical care, going to school, holding a job or entering public spaces.102,103 It is no surprise that Merriam-Webster Dictionary confirmed that the word “vaccine” was the number one most searched word in 2021.104
Now, today, even more people know somebody who was healthy, got vaccinated and was never healthy again.
And while US public health officials recommend that children get 72 doses of 17 vaccines,105 including COVID vaccine, and states mandate most of them, the exploding and still unexplained chronic disease and disability epidemic marked by chronic inflammation in the bodies of highly vaccinated children and young adults106,107 — which we have been talking about at NVIC for decades108,109,110 — continues to haunt every school in America.111
Reforming Laws That Violate Our Human Rights
The conversation about vaccination, health and autonomy that parents of DPT vaccine injured children started 40 years ago, has become the number one topic of conversation in homes, workplaces, schools, hospitals, capitals and courtrooms around the world.
Kathi and I know we could never have done this work for 40 years without the steadfast encouragement and support of caring people like you, who are reading or listening to this message.
Right now, through the NVIC Advocacy Portal, we are on the front lines in many states monitoring nearly 1,000 proposed vaccine-related bills and working with families and health freedom groups to stop mandatory vaccination and discriminatory vaccine passports laws.
In 2021, even though a few Governors and Mayors issued COVID vaccine mandates, no state legislature voted to mandate COVID vaccine.112 It was an historic rejection of federal vaccine policy by state legislators, who listened and responded to the will of the people.
But now that the US has become the first country to direct doctors to give mRNA COVID vaccine to all infants and toddlers under age two, we know there will be a big push to mandate the vaccine as a condition for children attending daycare, schools and other social activities.113
The dark cloud created by fear of a virus that plunged our nation and every nation into a nearly three-year nightmare is not over yet. It will only lift when we refuse to allow those profiting from the fear they promoted to make us comply with laws that violate our human rights.
Right now, we have an opportunity to build on the greater public awareness that has been generated by the oppression we have experienced during the COVID pandemic.114 In fact, there is every reason to move forward with renewed hope and determination.
In 2020 and 2021, people in this country and around the world stood up for liberty and against forced vaccination in larger numbers than ever before.115 Whenever the public health empire tries to mandate a new vaccine in the future, that shared memory will get in the way.
The Vaccine Culture War116,117 has been going on for 200 years and it has always been a David and Goliath battle, a marathon and not a sprint. It began with laws mandating that all children get the notoriously reactive smallpox vaccine,118 a vaccine that some public health doctors want to bring back because a monkeypox virus has suddenly popped up in countries where it had not been circulating before.119,120,121
And so, another round of virus fear mongering has begun, with the “experts” holding out a vaccine as the only solution. How many more microbes will be weaponized to keep the people living in perpetual fear of each other?
It’s time to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of the experts and declare our independence from those who want to rule over us with an iron fist. You do not have to be a doctor or scientist or have an academic title written after your name to be an authority on your own health and the health of your child.
You can empower yourself with information and stand up for your right to know and freedom to choose how you and your family stay healthy. You can defend your legal right to make voluntary vaccine decisions. The censorship that threatens to shut down the public conversation about vaccination, health and autonomy — a conversation that has been the focus of NVIC’s work since 1982 — can be overcome with grassroots action at the local level.
You never know how or when a small action you take will change someone’s life. Please make a commitment to enlighten a friend or someone in your own family or community about the importance of defending the human right to informed consent.
Go to NVIC.org and share our well referenced information like our new online Guide to Reforming Vaccine Policy and Law. Become a subscriber of NVIC’s free journal newspaper, The Vaccine Reaction, and get it delivered to your email box every week.
Sign up for the free NVIC Advocacy Portal at NVICAdvocacy.org and work in your state to protect your right to know and freedom to make vaccine choices for yourself and your children. Make a donation to NVIC on this, our 40th Anniversary, to help us continue to do this work under the most difficult circumstances we have ever faced.
Be the one who never has to say you did not do today what you could have done to change tomorrow. It’s your health. Your family. Your choice. And our mission continues: No forced vaccination. Not in America.
