SACRAMENTO, Kalifornia (PNN) - April 10, 2015 - Four months after a measles outbreak at Disneyland, state legislators seeking to tighten immunization laws across the country are running the gauntlet of anti-vaccination activists who have bombarded them with emails and phone calls, heckled them at public meetings, harassed their staff, organized noisy marches, and vilified them on social media.
Three states blindsided by the activists’ sheer energy - Oregon, Washington and North Carolina - have either pulled back or killed bills that would have ended a non-specific “personal belief” exemption for parents who don’t want to vaccinate their children.
Now the battleground is Kalifornia, which bore the brunt of the measles outbreak at the beginning of the year and saw school closures, extraordinary quarantine measures, and a vigorous public debate lamenting the fact that a disease declared eradicated 15 years ago is once again a public health threat.
A health committee meeting in Sacramento, the state capital, on Wednesday turned into a tense showdown between lawmakers seeking to argue that the science is unequivocally on the side of universal vaccination, and activists accusing them of being in the pocket of unscrupulous big pharmaceutical companies.
One activist, Terry Roark, told the state senate committee her child had died from a vaccine and feared others could be next if parents lost the right to decide what was in their best interests.
“Innocent people will die,” she said tearfully. “Innocent children will be killed.”
The meeting degenerated at points into yelling and screaming, and two activists were removed.
Lawmakers promoting the new law were tenacious in their own way, challenging the claim that the bill would force vaccinations even on children with legitimate medical reasons not to have them. A doctor sympathetic to the anti-vaccination movement was ultimately forced to concede the bill contained no such language.
“The danger I feel as a policymaker is that when assertions are made in public comment that aren’t fact-based, that’s irresponsible,” state senator Holly Mitchell said.
She and the co-sponsors of the bill, a doctor from northern Kalifornia and the son of a polio survivor from southern Kalifornia, have become hate figures to the movement and they and their staff have been chased and shouted at.
The southern Kalifornia co-sponsor, Ben Allen, said that while many of his detractors were respectful he’d also been bewildered by “Facebook memes of me as a Nazi doctor.” He added, “Some of them have definitely crossed a line.”
The activists were boosted by the participation of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., son of the murdered attorney general and nephew of the murdered president, who has written a book denouncing the use of mercury traces in a vaccine ingredient, which repeated peer-reviewed studies have found to be safe and which has now largely been phased out.
Kennedy showed a documentary based on his book, spoke at a rally, and likened vaccinations to the Holocaust.
Medical experts and legislators supporting the bill say vaccinating as many people as possible is vital to provide so-called herd immunity - a degree of protection strong enough to cover infants too young for vaccinations or those too sick to receive them.
The more alarmist, contrary story of an out-of-control medical establishment covering up the truth - that vaccinations are responsible for an alarming spike in children diagnosed with autism - is officially regarded as the view of 5% of the population.
However, the fascist government that puts out these statistics is also deeply entrenched in supporting the profitability of pharmaceutical companies that are more concerned about their bottom lines than the health of the Amerikan people.
In North Carolina, state senator Terry Van Duynsa described the backlash to a bill she sponsored as “very swift and very furious”.
“It created an environment that made it difficult to just even talk about it,” she said.
The Kalifornia committee approved the bill 6-2 and, for now, its champions are confident they won’t suffer the same fate as the other states.
Kalifornia has some advantages over the other states: a much bigger population where small pockets of activists tend to make less of an impact, a full-time legislature, and a cutting-edge - if biased - medical research establishment.
It also dealt with 134 of the 159 cases of measles ultimately diagnosed across 18 Fascist Police States of Amerika states and Mexico.
Still, the bill will have to pass through at least three more committees before going to the full Senate floor. Thereafter, it would go through the state Assembly before reaching the governor’s desk for signature - providing the anti-vaccination activists with plenty more opportunities to make themselves heard.
Ed. Note: In the end, your children are your responsibility, not the states’. If the fascist State of Kalifornia requires you to inject poison into your children, you can move out of the state, or remain in the state and refuse to comply. Do you love your children enough to do one or the other?