Washington State Comes One Step Closer to Ending Personal Vaccine Exemptions

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

In a 57-40 vote late Tuesday night, the Washington state House of Representatives passed a bill that could help address the state's measles outbreak, which so far has sickened at least 71 people—and counting. The bill goes to the state Senate next.

Currently, parents who oppose vaccines can claim medical, personal, or philosophical exemptions. This bill eliminates personal and philosophical exemptions for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines, which are required for anyone attending both public and private schools, day cares, and colleges in Washington state.

While the bill is widely supported by pediatricians and public health experts, it's faced fierce opposition from vaccine skeptics, including Robert Kennedy Jr., a anti-vax activist who continues to claim that vaccines cause autism and who testified before the House in Olympia. Last month, I interviewed another one of these skeptics: Bernadette Pajer, the head of Informed Choice Washington, who told me that she got involved in this fight after her now 15-year-old son suffered from a "vaccine injury" as a child.

“I know vaccines are designed to protect children from infection," she said, "but they are pharmaceutical products made by the same companies that make opioids."

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2019/03/06/39530742/washington-state-comes-one-step-closer-to-ending-personal-vaccine-exemptions

[Haggis for Breakfast]

1. Robert Kennedy, Jr. is the LAST person who should be advising anyone

about vaccinations. In 2005, he published a piece titled "Deadly Immunity" in which he brazenly repeatedly outright lies making a connection between vaccines and autism, claiming that children were being injected with 400 times the amount of mercury (thimerosal) that the FDA considers safe. This statement is a lie of staggering proportions and he knew it. He also claimed that children were being forced to receive 24 vaccines containing thimerosal. Not even remotely true.

In 2005, the CDC recommended a total of 8 vaccines for children under the age of 12 to cover over a dozen different illnesses.

There had been NO thimerosal in any vaccine since 2001.

None of this stopped Kennedy from claiming outrageous falsehoods. He has repeatedly ignored over two dozen studies conducted by the CDC, and the World Health Organization (WHO), not to mention the 2003 Immunization Safety Review published by the Institute of Medicine.

In 2012, after the release of "The Panic Virus" by Seth Mnookin, Director of MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing, Kennedy refused to meet with Mnookin.

in 2017, Dr. Susan Peschin, Director of the Alliance for Aging Research, published an open letter to Kennedy, "Your Anti-vaccine Crusade is a Disgrace to Science," in which she debunked one of his most vacuous diatribes against vaccines - "Vaccine development is hugely profitable for pharmaceutical companies." Yet these vaccinations are administered only once a year (some once in a lifetime). Hardly the HUGE financial incentive he claims. She also pointed out his personal hypocrisy, when she revealed that his promotional website states: "I am pro-vaccine. I have had all of my six children vaccinated. I believe vaccines save millions of lives."

I believe that his father and his uncle would be horrified at his hubris. But having followed his career for some time now, I am not in the least surprised.