Testimony to the Oregon Senate Health Committee
February 18, 2015
Submitted by Bob Snee
The day Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence warned us about while speaking at the Constitutional Convention, has arrived.
“The Constitution of this Republic should make special provision for medical freedom. To restrict the art of healing to one class will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic…Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution; the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship and force people, who wish doctors and treatments of their own choice, to submit to only what the dictating outfit offers. The Constitution of the Republic should make a Special provision for medical freedoms as well as religious freedom."
The threats to our Constitutional Rights are all around us and are even coming from you, our own legislators. Just as “national security” is being used by the federal government to justify invading the privacy of citizens, the “greater good” is used to justify under proposed SB 442, infringing upon the religious freedoms and freedom of conscience guaranteed to Oregonians under Oregon’s Constitution.
An organized orchestrated hysteria pushed by the national media as a result of just over 100 cases of the measles (with no deaths) is the driving force behind the push to restrict individual freedoms. When Time magazine publishes an article calling for the publication of the names and addresses of those who are unvaccinated, a new era of McCarthyism has descended upon this country. This nation was founded on the principles of individual freedom and liberty, and the Bill of Rights were adopted as amendments to the U.S. Constitution to ensure that government never overreached and trampled upon the rights of an individual.
SB 442 as currently drafted, and as it is proposed to be amended, will trample and shred Oregonian’s fundamental rights protected under the U.S. and Oregon Constitutions. If passed, SB 442 will unethically require forced medical procedures upon those who object because they have taken the time to educate themselves on the true risks of vaccines. We are living in an age of the great denial of vaccine risks and denial of individual freedom. Because vaccine manufacturers market and sell the only product in the history of the country that is exempt from all liability for design or manufacturing defects, by making vaccines mandatory, people will become nothing more than enslaved consumers of potentially dangerous products marketed by companies with no economic or legal incentive to improve those products.
Mandatory forced vaccination will trample on some of the foundations of medical ethics which require fully informed consent to any invasive medical procedure. The First Principle of the Nuremberg Code is,
“The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.”
The FDA, CDC and vaccine makers openly state that often the number of human subjects used in pre-licensing studies are too small to detect rarer adverse events, making post-marketing surveillance of new vaccines a de facto scientific experiment. In this regard, the ethical principle of informed consent to vaccination attains even greater importance. Forced vaccinations are different than other medical procedures is such a way that they demand greater deference to the ethic of informed consent, not less consideration. Every other medical procedure is an attempt to heal or remedy an already injured or diseased body. Vaccinations, by their very nature and design, purposely inject directly into a healthy body several known neurotoxins and live biological viruses in an attempt to create an immune response to protect against a mere potential that the person will encounter that targeted disease at some point in their future. A nurse I know recently argued with me while agreeing that all the potential side effects listed in a vaccine’s package insert are not listed in the CDC’s required vaccine information sheet, that “They have to dumb things down a bit so that average people can understand it.” How can you say that people are getting and making informed consent if they are not given complete information?
Mandatory forced vaccination makes a mockery of informed consent.
While researching this issue, I discovered that the American Medical Association’s Code of Ethics specifically recognizes that physicians may claim a religious or philosophic reason to not be immunized. AMA Code of Ethics Opinion 9.133 If doctors express the belief that it is ethical to claim a religious or philosophic exemption to vaccines, under what claim of right does the state have the capability of outlawing ethical behavior by its citizens?
Currently, as a result of the passage of SB 132 in 2013, the specific religious exemption for mandatory vaccines was eliminated with an acknowledgement that people who claim a nonmedical exemption may list religion as the reason. The former Oregon Administrative Rules defined “religion” as “any set of beliefs, practices, or ethical values.” In 2001, SB 450 was introduced at my request by then Senator Kate Brown, to provide for a philosophical objection to vaccines. The Oregon Health Department testified against SB 450 saying it was unnecessary since philosophical exemptions were protected under the Administrative definition of “religion.” The Administrative definition of “religion” encompasses the “rights of conscience.” That protection is now gone and SB 442 will further eliminate Oregonian’s Constitutional rights as set forth in Article I, Section 3, which states: “Freedom of religious opinion. No law shall in any case whatever control the free exercise, and enjoyment of religeous [sic] opinions, or interfere with the rights of conscience.”
If government in America is allowed to force its fellow citizens to risk injury or death without their voluntary, informed consent, then we are no longer free Americans. Our bodies are then owned by the state and can be sacrificed by the will of the state. Once you take away a parent’s right to make medical decisions based on informed consent for their children, it is only a short step before everyone loses that right to determine what substances will enter their body, since mandatory adult vaccines will quickly follow. Published just last week in the Federal Register for public comment is the new “National Adult Immunization Plan.” The very first line in the introduction to the plan states “Despite the widespread availability of safe and effective vaccines, adult vaccination rates remain low in the United States and far below Healthy People 2020 targets.” This misstatement of fact and denial of risk, in the absence of true vaccine safety studies, is astonishing when one considers a mere 29 years ago, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Act was adopted acknowledging that vaccine injury or death may be “unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and accompanied by proper directions and warnings.” 42 U.S.C. 300aa-22(b)(1).
No real world studies of the vaccine schedule have ever been done. Of the 11 separate vaccines given to our children (many given multiple times), only one vaccine -- the MMR -- has ever been studied for its relationship to autism. Yet, our children get 6 or 7 different vaccines simultaneously at 2, 4, 6, and 12 month doctor appointments. Not one study compares vaccinated children to unvaccinated children.
Dr. Russell Blaylock, a neurosurgeon who has written eight papers and several chapters on the mechanisms of vaccine-induced neuropathology and neurological injury and proposed a plausible mechanism to explain a link to vaccine-induced autism, has stated:
“All of us should be terrified by the totalitarian nature exercised by the proponents of mandatory vaccines. Many are openly calling not only for mandatory vaccinations, but also hiding critical safety data from the public so as to give the impression of vaccine safety. Programs for mandated eugenics ended when the public realized the true result of such plans. This history is now rarely spoken about, yet present vaccine policies are just as frightening because they hold the potential to irreversibly destroy the lives of millions of our children.”
Proposed SB 442 clearly interferes and burdens the rights of conscience and will violate the Oregon Constitution if passed. As citizens, we must demand accountability of our government and demand our government protect our rights, not disregard them for “the greater good.” If SB 442 becomes law, then the promises of freedom and liberty that this nation were founded upon are nothing but a sham, an illusion. Welcome to the totalitarian era. for then our bodies, ourselves, our souls, are truly owned by the state.
Robert Snee is an attorney in Portland, Oregon.
