March 11, 2015 Update Dear NVIC Advocacy Team Members, The war on families making selective and informed vaccination decisions continues to rage in state legislatures across the country. As of March 11, 2015, NVIC is tracking 110 bills across 36 states!

[Scroll down to see a list of all the bills.] There is no coincidence regarding common bill language removing rights appearing in bills across the country. This is an orchestrated legislative effort by those who want to force vaccination. Deadlines to file bills are happening now and committee hearings are starting to kick into full gear. Some bills are surging forward and immediate action is needed while in other states, active opposition and education has made a profound impact to slowing the bills down.

ELIMINATING AND RESTRICTING VACCINE EXEMPTIONS Hearings to remove philosophical/conscientious exemptions to vaccine mandates have already taken place in Washington and Oregon.  California, Maine, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Vermont all have bills already filed or press announcements of bills about to be filed to remove philosophical/conscientious exemptions.  Connecticut, Maine, Minnesota and Texas have bills to substantially restrict philosophical/conscientious exemptions. Religious exemptions are also under attack. Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Texas and Vermont have bills filed or announced to eliminate religious exemptions, and Illinois, New Mexico and Texas have bills filed or announced to unconstitutionally restrict religious exemptions.

EXPANDED VACCINE MANDATES Fifteen states have bills filed to expand vaccine mandates. These include Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and West Virginia. What is so disturbing about the Texas and Vermont bills are the vaccine mandates are for school employees, and there are no philosophical or religious exemptions allowed. These are the first states to go after teachers, school administrators and school staff. Nothing like this has been passed before. It is very concerning that Hawaii, New York and Texas have bills filed to allow some minor children to consent to their own vaccines behind their parents’ backs without their parents’ knowledge or consent. California already has this language in statute. This is in violation with federal law that requires parents to get Vaccine Information Statements so they can make an informed decision.

POLICE AND EMERGENCY POWERS Two states, Arizona and Texas, have bills that affect police and emergency powers. The Texas bill gives the police the power to forcibly detain people only suspected of having been exposed to an infectious disease and eliminates the protective requirement for a warrant.

EXPAND AND FORCE INTRUSIVE VACCINE TRACKING AND VACCINE DATA SHARING 11 states, Arizona, Idaho, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, South Dakota, Texas, and Vermont all have bills filed to require or expand vaccine status tracking in most cases without knowledge or consent to be used as mandatory vaccine enforcement systems.

PUBLICALLY PUBLISH EXEMPTION AND VACCINATION RATES Five states, Arizona, Maryland, Missouri, Oregon, South Dakota, and Texas have bills filed to publically release vaccination and exemption rates by areas as small as individual schools and day care facilities to create an even more divisive, discriminatory and prejudicial environment towards children with vaccine exemptions. Isolating and marginalizing healthy children whose parents don’t agree with all government mandated vaccines is un-American. These bills create an environment conducive to pitting parent against parent and child against child in an attempt to use community peer pressure as a club to coerce parents to vaccinate against their conscience and religious beliefs. These bills have nothing to do with public health and protecting immune compromised students when you consider the following facts: Some people are non-responders to some vaccines and vaccine effectiveness for some vaccines, especially for pertussis containing vaccines, wanes rapidly. Some students are provisionally enrolled and not fully vaccinated. Federal law, the McKinney-Vento Act, requires that homeless students be allowed to attend school without proof of immunizations. There are no requirements that teachers, staff, and administration be vaccinated with the same childhood vaccine schedule. These all are people who are no different immunologically than a healthy student with a vaccine exemption and yet they represent a much larger percentage of the school population than the students with a vaccine exemption targeted by these bills. On the other hand, students with active HIV infections are not only allowed to attend school, their confidentiality of their infection status is protected in state and federal law. Students who are vaccinated with live viral vaccines experience viral shedding and can infect susceptible individuals for a period of several weeks post vaccination. Some people who are vaccinated still get the illness while some have subclinical infections and can still transmit vaccine preventable diseases and not show symptoms because the vaccine suppresses them. If this is all about protecting health, where are all the bills requiring disclosures about all of the above to parents?

WHAT CAN YOU DO? Assess what you are up against in your state. Log into the NVIC Advocacy Portal at http://NVICAdvocacy.org and look below to see a snapshot of what bills are currently filed in your state. First, contact your own legislators and their staff, and then ask your friends and family to do the same. Immediately contact your state legislators and connect to them from your heart about why these bills can hurt your family. Do not wimp out and just send an email if there is any way possible you can meet with them in person or talk on the phone to them. Make them look into your eyes or hear your voice when you sincerely tell them about vaccine reactions and health concerns for your family, how you and your children have been treated by doctors and your school over this issue, why you delay or decline vaccines, and why they may want to preserve this right for themselves and their own family in the future. If you follow a non-pharmaceutically based model of health care, tell them why. Educate them. You have to connect to them on a personal level so they can get this.  Find out what other bills they have sponsored so you can find common ground about things you both care and agree about to break the ice. We are fighting a very powerful pharma/medical forced vaccination lobby, but they don’t have these personal connections that constituents have.

Please register for the NVIC Advocacy Portal if you haven’t already and make it a habit to log in frequently to stay updated and learn what you can do to help with each bill in your state.  Registration is required so we can help connect you with your legislators. Check the bill status on the NVIC Advocacy Portal to see if you have any upcoming hearings on the bills and make every effort to attend the hearing and register your position on the bill and offer written and/or oral testimony. Additionally, one of the most helpful additional things you can do is to take proactive steps to reach out into your community to your local supportive health care practitioners, parenting groups, political groups, natural health websites and blogs, and friends and family asking them to share this information with their contacts so they can communicate with their legislators too. Keep the media honest! If you see an article or news show somewhere with misinformation, take the time to comment, submit a letter, and reach out to news editors to correct the misinformation. Do not let these decisions be made for you by those whose power, positions or profit are dependent on forced vaccination.

LEGISLATIVE EDUCATION ACTION NEEDED NOW

• Register/Login to the NVIC Advocacy Portal at http://NVICAdvocacy.org.
• Lookup your state legislators and their contact information. Click on “Check What is Happening in Your State” on the home page or “My State” on the STATE TEAMS Tab.  Your personal state legislators (House, Senate, Governor and Lieutenant Governor) are listed on the right side of the page. Click on them one at a time to display their contact information.
• Choose how you would like to deliver your message. The suggested modes of communication below are listed in the order of being more likely to be more impactful on educating your legislator. Make the personal appointments. Please don’t think signing a petition is going to change anything.
• a) Make an appointment for a direct personal visit;
• b) Make an appointment to talk directly in a personal phone call;
• c) Make an appointment to talk in person to a legislative aide;
• d) Call and talk to a legislative aide to relay a message; or e) Send an email through web contact forms or legislative email address.
• Suggested talking points for state legislators: Introduce yourself and identify yourself as a constituent.  (If this is a meeting or a phone call, ask them if they agree with the statement that nobody should be forced to submit to any medical procedure, including vaccination, which carries the risk of injury or death.) Share that you are very concerned about some of the divisive one-sided conversations and bills being filed right now regarding vaccination exemption rights (or bills filed in your state). Explain why it is important to your family to be able to delay or decline vaccination.  This is where you could share your vaccine reaction, harassment, or vaccine failure story to personalize your communication. Explain that there are some very important reasons why legally protecting the right to informed consent to vaccination without penalty by the state should be a priority and these crucial points have been left out of the conversation by forced vaccination proponents.
• Vaccines are pharmaceutical products that cause injury and death for some.  The United States Government has paid out more than $3 billion dollars to vaccine victims. Many more people have adverse reactions. Nobody can predict who will be harmed from vaccines.
• Vaccines manufacturers and the doctors who administer vaccines are completely shielded from liability for vaccine injuries and deaths.
• Vaccines fail sometimes where even fully vaccinated people become infected.  Nobody can predict who will or will not respond to vaccines.
• Children today receive 69 doses of vaccines for 16 different viral and bacterial illnesses which more than doubles the government childhood schedule of 34 doses of 11 different vaccines in the year 2000.  A vaccine exemption is filed regardless of whether the exemption is filed for one dose or all doses. 35 doses and 5 more unique vaccines have been added to the schedule in the last 15 years. Those supporting forced vaccination are being dishonest by not acknowledging the exploding vaccine schedule while sounding alarms over small increases in overall non-medical exemptions.
• There are hundreds of new vaccines in development including some of the following in clinical trials: HIV, herpes, E. coli, dengue fever, avian influenza, smallpox, tuberculosis, typhoid, norovirus, cholera, smoking cessation, syphilis, and gonorrhea. If vaccine manufactures and others who profit from forced vaccination convince legislators take away our right to delay or decline a vaccine now, what will our future look like?
• In the past 5 years, drug makers have paid the U.S. Government $19.2 billion in criminal and civil FRAUD penalties. Skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry is well deserved, and it doesn’t imply a skepticism of science.
• Physicians, in the American Medical Association Code of Ethics, affirm philosophical and religious exemptions for themselves. See Opinion 9.133 Routine Universal Immunization of Physicians.  Parents should have that same right. Refer to “Measles in Disneyland: Third MMR Shot and Vaccine Exemption Ban?”  by NVIC’s President Barbara Loe Fisher for some illuminating insight into facts that need to be exposed about the California measles outbreak and other vaccine failures.
  http://www.nvic.org/NVIC-Vaccine-News/January-2015/measles-in-disneyland-third-mmr-shot-and-vaccine.aspx    
• Please forward this email to family and friends and ask them to share their concerns with their legislators as well. You can post the link to this alert on social media: http://www.nvicadvocacy.org/members/National/ActionAlertDetails.aspx?itemid=649&Page=True
• Refer to NVIC’s “Reforming Vaccine Policy and Law” guide for answers to questions your legislators may have.  The fully referenced version can be found on our site posted at: http://www.nvic.org/Vaccine-Laws/state-vaccine-requirements/Reforming-Vaccine-Policy—Law-Guide.aspx. You can include this link in your letters as well.

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