Friday, September 4, 2009

Letter on Coercive Vaccination campaigns

The following letter was sent to the ABC by one of our members, Judy Wilyman, who is a PhD Student at Murdoch University in WA. So far, this letter has not been posted to the 7:30 report web site, but it was so excellent, I really felt impelled to share it with you. It gets right to the heart of why we are activists, what we want to achieve and why silencing the AVN will not benefit anyone but those with a vested interest in seeing vaccinations without proper information continue - the drug companies that produce these shots.


 
Judy has also sent through a poster which she has put together which the AVN will shortly be reproducing for sale. If you have a place where you would be able to display this excellent and informative poster in your place of business, school or any other public venue, that would be great. Please email janiece@avn.org.au and ask her to send it through to you as a pdf file so you can preview it. Judy has also provided us with two papers she has written and you can find those by clicking here and here.

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Dear Sir/Madam,



I am writing to bring to your attention a human rights issue that many community members are concerned about. This issue is the increasingly coercive nature of the childhood immunisation schedule and the recent implementation of mandatory immunisation for health professionals and students intending to work in clinical situations.


The childhood immunisation schedule has been linked to welfare benefits, school entry and doctors pay. This means that parents who choose not to vaccinate their children are required to fill out a conscientious objector's form which many parents are not informed about. In other words parents are not being openly informed that vaccination in Australia is not compulsory and that they have a right to choose this procedure.
 


Is it legal for a government to misinform the public about a public health policy?



Immunisation is a medical intervention for healthy individuals and as such we should have the right to choose how we look after our own health unless the government can provide conclusive evidence that the benefits of the vaccines on the recommended schedule conclusively outweigh the risks to individuals.

The Precautionary Principle should apply if the science on a new technology or procedure is incomplete. This principle states that "The burden of proof of harmlessness of any new technology/process/activity/chemical is on the proponent and not the general public".


I have just watched the presentation of the whooping cough debate on the ABC 7.30 Report and am concerned that the government continues to use anecdotal evidence and fear of whooping cough to support whooping cough immunisation . Attached to this email is an article that was published in the Public Health Association of Australia's newsletter illustrating that the vaccine does not control the incidence of this disease and this fact is supported by public health officials of the 20th century.


Therefore I would like the government to provide the following evidence to support the claim that vaccines are safe and effective:



1) Evidence of the vaccination status of cases of whooping cough that are hospitalised or result in mortality? This evidence is not provided to the public to convince us of the need for the vaccine. We continue to have serious outbreaks of whooping cough despite the fact that Australia has had a vaccination rate of 90% in infants for the last decade. This trend is also observed in America and England.



2) Evidence that the whooping cough vaccine prevents the most severe cases of this disease. This can only be demonstrated if you have monitored the vaccination status of hospitalised cases of this disease. Yet this has not been publicised to support this claim by the government.
 


3) The whooping cough vaccine has not controlled the incidence of this disease since it was first used in 1954. Public health officials of the 20th century have explained why this is the case (see attachment). So why is the government promoting this policy to the public under the impression that it will control the incidence of whooping cough?



4) The government knows that children vaccinated against whooping cough are still getting this disease. So how is the government able to claim that it is the unvaccinated children that are spreading this disease?



5) Children under 6 months - the age of highest mortality - cannot be protected from this vaccine. A child is only protected after 3 doses of this vaccine and this occurs after 6 months.



6) Where are the long-term studies which show it is safe to combine 12 vaccines in an infant's body? There are many studies showing that the chemicals in vaccines can cause chronic illness in humans. Therefore it is essential that long-term health studies have been done of the combined effects - cumulative and synergistic - of the 12 vaccines the government is recommending we put into an infant's body. Can you please provide this evidence? It is well known that the toxicity of substances varies with age, gender and genetics and that health effects can have latency periods.
 


7) Why are Hepatitis B and chickenpox vaccines recommended for all infants when they are a risk to a small minority of children?
 


Many families rely on welfare benefits and are therefore feeling forced to vaccinate even though they are concerned about the escalating chronic illness in children. 41% of children 1-14 years of age now have a chronic illness (AIHW).

I would like you to justify this policy which leads the public to believe immunisation in Australia is compulsory.

It is important that the government can provide open and transparent information to explain why it has implemented mandatory and coercive immunisation policies. I believe it is unethical for these policies to be coercive if the above evidence is not provided by an independent body.
 


This is not rocket science. The chemicals in vaccines are observed to have harmful effects in animals. When they are injected directly into the tissues of infants they bypass the normal defence mechanisms. The government has continued to increase the number of vaccines on the schedule without knowing the long-term health effects of combining these vaccines and without fully understanding the functioning of human body systems.

In addition, parents have not been informed that all vaccines in previous years have contained antibiotics, preservatives (mercury, formaldehyde) and aluminium adjuvants.
 
I have been investigating vaccines for a number of years and I am currently doing a PhD at Murdoch University supported by Associate Professor Peter Dingle and Associate Professor Brian Martin.

I will attach the poster and papers that I have recently had published at the National Health Promotion Conference and in the ACNEM journal of medicine.
 


It is a fact that the safety and efficacy clinical trials for vaccines performed by the NHMRC are sponsored by the pharmaceutical companies. This is not objective science and the bias is enhanced by preventing the general community (upon whom this policy is being imposed) from having an input into the risk assessment process. This is against the risk assessment guidelines.



It is known that the risk assessment for the use of a drug/vaccine will vary according to the assessor and the stake they have in the procedure.
This is an issue which concerns all of us and the genetics of the population is at risk if we do not have the science to support this policy. It is time that all possible causes of chronic illness in children were examined to prevent the cost that we are observing to society. In addition, mandatory and coercive policies are inappropriate if this evidence is not provided and the government is currently misleading the public by promoting this public health policy as if it were compulsory when it is not.


Kind regards

Judy Wilyman.

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