Vaccine Freedom of Choice
by Barbara Loe Fisher
Co-founder & President
National Vaccine Information Center
Rally for Conscientious Exemption to Vaccination
October 16, 2008
Trenton, New Jersey
We come to this State Capitol today to celebrate freedom of speech and participate in the democratic process. Representing three generations, we are standing publicly for the legal right to follow our conscience when making educated vaccine decisions for our families.
Among us are parents with healthy children and those with children who have been hurt by one-size-fits-all vaccine mandates that ignore the genetic and biological differences which make some people more vulnerable than others for having severe reactions to prescription drugs and vaccines.
No American should be legally forced to play vaccine roulette with a child’s life.
Twenty eight years ago, I watched my two and a half year old son, Chris, suffer a brain inflammation within hours of his fourth DPT shot and become learning disabled. Back then, parents did not know vaccines contain bioactive and toxic ingredients that can inflame and damage brains and immune systems. Today many more parents do know because they either have a child who regressed into poor health after vaccination or know one.
During the past 30 years, public health officials have persuaded state legislators to triple the number of doses of mandated vaccines for daycare and school entry. And now more babies than ever are dying as America has plummeted among nations in infant mortality and an epidemic of chronic disease and disability is destroying the health of more highly vaccinated children than any infectious disease epidemic in our history, including smallpox, polio, whooping cough and measles.
The response by health officials to this unprecedented national child health crisis is to tell parents that, every time another child dies or regresses into poor health after vaccination, it is just a “coincidence” while quietly writing those children off as acceptable losses. It is this tragic moral failure and scientific miscalculation by doctors we have trusted that now threatens the biological integrity of future generations of Americans.
If we cannot be free to make informed, voluntary decisions about which pharmaceutical products we are willing to risk our lives for, then we are not free in any sense of the word. Because if the State can tag, track down and force individuals against their will to be injected with biological products of unknown toxicity today, then there will be no limit on which individual freedoms the State can take away in the name of the greater good tomorrow.
When you enter the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., you see an inscription. It says: “The first to perish were the children…from these a new dawn might have risen.”
We believe every life is important and will not look the other way while vulnerable children are being sacrificed in the name of the community good.
We believe in compassion because when one member of the community is considered expendable, we are all considered expendable.
We believe in truth and will not be silent when we know government, industry and doctors could do so much more to make vaccines and vaccine policies safer.
We believe in justice and will find a way to hold those exploiting the people for profit and power accountable in a court of law.
We believe in liberty and will fight for the right to use our intelligence and follow our conscience when making health care decisions for ourselves and our children.
We believe in the future and will do whatever it takes to give children back the future that is their birthright.
We will come again to this State Capitol and every State Capitol until common sense and respect for the informed consent ethic is translated into law.
What do we want? Freedom.
No forced vaccination. Not in America.
