Barbara Loe Fisher of The National Vaccine Information Center Named “Game Changer of the Year”

Each year during the anniversary week of Mercola.com, we recognize a Game Changer, someone whose work stands as a great service to humanity by making a significant contribution to improving people's health. This year, we present the Game Changer Award to Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a nonprofit charity that provides information on vaccine safety and efficacy on the internet. NVIC was founded in 1982 by parents of vaccine injured children — Fisher being one of them. Fisher’s oldest son suffered a vaccine injury in 1980 following his fourth DPT shot, leaving him with mild brain damage resulting in learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder. NVIC’s goal is to “[prevent] vaccine injuries and deaths through public education and safety reforms,” Fisher told The New York Times in 2001. Fisher’s two other children received all recommended vaccines with the exception of the whole-cell pertussis that injured her oldest son. “The vaccine-safety and informed-consent movement has never been about telling parents not to vaccinate. We're pro-education and pro-informed consent, not antivaccine. There is a difference. It is immoral to write off an unknown number of children as expendable in the name of the greater good to justify public health policy,” Barbara told The New York Times. This is a stance Fisher and NVIC have maintained ever since its inception, even though critics choose to portray the organization as a source of dangerous antivaccine propaganda.

N.Y. Law Professor Addresses U.N. on Government Vaccine Policies Violating the Nuremberg Code

New York University research scholar and law professor Mary Holland recently addressed the United Nations at the 25th International Health and Environment Conference. Professor Holland has been one of the lone voices in the U.S. addressing the legal ramifications of removing parental rights to informed consent for childhood vaccines. Professor Holland sees major civil rights issues involved in government vaccine policies that remove informed consent rights to refuse mandatory vaccinations. She reminds the United Nations that history has shown us the results of such overt government intrusion into personal medical rights. World-wide human rights legislation has been put into place to protect individuals from government intrusion into medical abuse, starting with the Nuremberg Code just after the atrocities of Nazi Germany after World War II. Professor Holland states: "[T]he UN and the international community have obligations to respect human rights related to vaccination. Since World War II, the international community has recognized the grave dangers in involuntary scientific and medical experimentation on human subjects. In the aftermath of Nazi medical atrocities, the world affirmed the Nuremberg Code which stated that the 'voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.' The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights further enshrined this prohibition against involuntary experimentation in its 1966 text, stating 'no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.' Such a prohibition is now so universally recognized that some courts and scholars have pronounced the right to informed consent in experiments as a matter of customary international law."