An Act Relating to Misinformed Consent to Immunizations for Children

In the middle of a pandemic that has killed over 500,000 people and just after the largest measles outbreaks we have seen in the United States in 27 years, measles outbreaks in which at least one person died, Senator Bob Hall of Texas has introduced a vaccine bill that the Texas Medical Association describes as a vaccine scare-tactic bill.

A vaccine scare-tactic bill?

“Promoting vaccines is of the utmost importance in this pandemic-marred moment in history, the Texas Medical Association told the Texas Senate Health and Human Services Committee today.
That’s why TMA stands in strong opposition to a bill that the house of medicine believes could do the opposite – discourage vaccinations with a smokescreen of complicated, technical information that could scare parents of young patients.”
TMA Opposes Vaccine Scare-Tactic Bill

Wait, what’s in the bill that would scare parents?

“Heard in today’s committee hearing, Senate Bill 1310 by Sen. Bob Hall (R-Edgewood) would require physicians to disclose the excipients contained in a vaccine in order to obtain informed consent from parents before administering the vaccine to their children. Excipients include preservatives, adjuvants, and stabilizers, as well as other types of materials that are used during the manufacturing process and removed before the vaccine is shipped out.”
TMA Opposes Vaccine Scare-Tactic Bill

Disclosing the excipients in vaccines?

Is that really scary?

Why would parents need to know the excipients in the Anthrax and Ebola vaccines?

Would it be scary to see a list of the vaccine excipients and media summary published by the CDC when your kids get their vaccines?

Does Senator Hall even know what an excipient is? Or what’s in our vaccines?

“The excipient document actually contains the non-vaccine things that are added to… added to… added to the vaccine they are receiving. Some people are actually allergic to some of these things. Like you have one here at the top with mono sodium glucamate that’s in it. And there are people who are allergic to that. Others to people that have fetal parts in them that people for religious reasons might not want to take that vaccine. Some may even have aluminum in them and there are a lot of people who are concerned about having aluminum. So it’s just a matter of making an informed consent knowing what is being done to them.”
Texas Senator Bob Hall

As most folks know, there are no “fetal parts” in any vaccine.

Some vaccines are made in cell lines that originated from fetuses that were aborted over 40 years ago. These vaccines are made in descendent cells from either the WI-38, MRC-5, HEK-293, and PER.C6 cell lines, which have been duplicated over and over again and are now grown independently.

“One is morally free to use the vaccine regardless of its historical association with abortion. The reason is that the risk to public health, if one chooses not to vaccinate, outweighs the legitimate concern about the origins of the vaccine. This is especially important for parents, who have a moral obligation to protect the life and health of their children and those around them.”
National Catholic Bioethics Center FAQ on the Use of Vaccines

That Bob Hall brings up the idea of “fetal parts” in vaccines and that aluminum and MSG are something to be concerned about tells you everything you need to know about his Act Relating to Misinformed Consent to Immunizations for Children.

What else does Bob Hall get wrong?

He keeps going back to the myth that vaccine manufacturers have no liability, and we need some kind of extra informed consent because “we are doing something so dangerous that the federal government has put up a barrier relieving the pharmaceuticals and doctors of any responsibility for any adverse affect.”

“As the number of lawsuits grew to hundreds during the early 1980s, the pharmaceutical companies making vaccines saw their liability insurance bills soar. Worried not only about multimillion-dollar settlements, but also even the legal costs of defending themselves successfully, several companies simply stopped making vaccine.””
How a Media Scare On Vaccine Started a ‘near-Epidemic’

He doesn’t mention that most of the lawsuits that triggered the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Act passed in 1986, creating the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and the Vaccine Court, were found to be frivolous!

What are Vaccine Excipients?

In truth, there is nothing about vaccine excipients that should scare parents.

“In addition to weakened or killed disease antigens (viruses or bacteria), vaccines contain very small amounts of other ingredients – excipients.”
Vaccine Excipient Summary

Vaccine excipients can include:

adjuvants – aluminum salts, squalene
antibiotics – neomycin, polymyxin B sulfate, streptomycin
cell culture materials – albumin, amino acids, yeast, fetal bovine serum proteins, chicken egg proteins, WI-38 and MRC-5 cells including residual DNA and protein
inactivating materials – formaldehyde
preservatives – thimerosal, EDTA
stabilizers and buffers – salts, sugars, gelatin, albumin, polysorbate 80

These ingredients in vaccines are safe and in many cases are actually removed from the final vaccine. These include antibiotics, cell culture materials, and inactivating materials, which can usually only be detected in trace or residual amounts in vaccines.

Not that you would understand all of that from simply reading the vaccine excipient list.

“It’s information without context.”
Marjan Linnell, MD

Still, it is no secret that vaccines contain these ingredients.

Nor is it a secret why vaccines contain these ingredients. After all, without them, we wouldn’t have these vaccines!

In general, many of these inactive ingredients keep the components in the vaccine from separating, settling, and help maintain their potency during transport and storage. Others keep the vaccines from becoming contaminated. And the cell culture materials are needed to actually grow the vaccine antigens.

Can you see what’s wrong with this immunization bill and others like it?

SB 1310 by Bob Hall in Texas is best described as An Act Relating to Misinformed Consent to Immunizations for Children. — SB 1310 by Bob Hall in Texas is best described as *An Act Relating to Misinformed Consent to Immunizations for Children*.

If it wasn’t just about scaring parents away from vaccinating and protecting their kids, instead of just listing the vaccine excipient and media summary, wouldn’t there be information about why those excipients are safe and necessary?

There is already a federal law that mandates folks get a vaccine information statement before they are vaccinated. A vaccine information statement that includes information about VAERS and the NVICP program.

And why no information of the risks of skipping or delaying getting vaccinated and protected?

Say No to Anti-Vaccine Legislation

As some states move toward stronger immunization laws, the Act Relating to Misinformed Consent to Immunizations for Children from Senator Bob Hall of Texas is redundant and a step backward that will harm kids and could lead to more outbreaks of vaccine preventable diseases.

We need to work to improve immunization rates, not scare parents further away from vaccinating and protecting their kids.

Do the Texas legislators considering this bill know that worldwide, over 207,500 people died with measles in 2019, with measles deaths jumping nearly 50 percent since 2016?

Do the legislators in Texas know how much was spent to contain the measles outbreaks of 2019?

“No significant fiscal implication to units of local government is anticipated.”
Texas Senate Bill 1310

Or the 2013 measles outbreak at the megachurch in Texas?

Still think that an immunization law that will “discourage vaccinations with a smokescreen of complicated, technical information that could scare parents of young patients” won’t have any significant fiscal implications???

“I’m just not sure what this brings, other than burdensome regulations… burdensome paperwork, and extra time, when a docs already talking… the pediatrician is already talking to the parents and the kids.”
Texas Senator Donna Campbell

What about the cost of printing out the extra pages of vaccine excipients? While the costs of this unfunded mandate will have to be absorbed by most pediatricians, what about folks who get their vaccines from public clinics and health departments? The bill doesn’t seem to budget any extra money for them, does it?

Still wondering if this an anti-vaccine bill?

Let’s take a look at who testified in support of the bill and what they said:

Rebecca Hardy – claims that the package inserts are what is needed to make an informed decision about vaccines, that the VIS omits information about vaccine ingredients, and that the burden of informed consent is on folks getting vaccinated. Her testimony included AV tropes like the $4 billion payout for vaccine injury claims, neglecting to mention it was after administering billions and billions of doses of vaccines over more than 30 years, and the recent “Harvard” study which said that only 1% of vaccine injuries are ever reported, except the study wasn’t done at Harvard and it wasn’t even about vaccine injuries…
Jackie Schlegel – has an autistic daughter and claims that the current dialog about informed consent over vaccines is that all vaccines are good for all people all of the time, even as we know her organization is behind the idea that we need vaccine choice because they think mandates force people to get vaccinated and they push the idea that vaccines are dangerous for everyone.
Alan Hopkins – an ER doctor who provides lab resources, training and marketing tools to integrative health coaches, who fears forced vaccination of children for COVID-19, and believes he has diagnosed kids with Guillain-Barré syndrome and encephalitis after their flu vaccine. And seems to think nothing of the nearly 300 kids who have died of COVID-19!
Stephanie Shultz – supports the bill because her daughter has multiple food allergies, even though having food allergies to eggs, milk, and soy, etc. are typically not a contraindication to getting vaccinated.
Del Bigtree – goes on about PEG, polysorbate, and mercury in flu shots… How many times does he say mercury in his testimony, even though about 87% of flu vaccines are thimerosal free and thimerosal is metabolized to ethylmercury? And the idea that anyone is hiding vaccine ingredients is silly, as vaccine inserts and vaccine excipient lists are already ready available.
Sheila Hemphill – gave her weekly update on COVID-19 vaccine death rates… which of course are just reports from VAERS and are not deaths that have actually been found to be caused by a vaccine. In testifying for another bill, she claimed that there were strands of HIV in the SARS-CoV-2 virus and talked about COVID-19, prions, and Mad Cow Disease…

Why is vaccine hesitancy a growing problem, as Del Bigtree points out? It isn’t a lack of information.

It is all of the misinformation put out by folks like Del Bigtree! They are the ones suppressing information, as they only talk about the risks of vaccines (which they overstate), never talking about vaccine benefits or the risks of vaccine-preventable diseases, all the while claiming that anything that happens to you after you have had a vaccine is a vaccine injury.

What to Know These Kinds of Vaccine Bills

They may talk about liberty and informed consent, but vaccine bills like SB 1310 by Texas Senator Bob Hall have one aim, to scare parents. And that’s why similar bills in Arizona, Iowa, Missouri, and Oregon, all failed to make it out of committee.

Just look at all of the times Senator Hall and the people he invited to support his bill misinformed everyone about vaccines as they talked about the bill!

“Parents are an important demographic for anti-vaxxers, since the majority of vaccinations take place in childhood. As such, anti-vaxxers have developed ways of adapting their messaging and methods to more effectively drive vaccine hesitancy amongst parents. This messaging recasts the anti-vaxxer master narrative in even stronger emotional and moral terms. Emotive images of distressed children, alongside moving accounts of children who have suffered vaccine injuries, appeal to parents’ protective instincts. This is accompanied by a moral appeal that links vaccine hesitancy to good parenting: vaccine hesitant parents are characterised as taking action to protect their children from unknown risks, and as rejecting the advice of experts in favour of their own parental intuition.”
The Anti-Vaxx Playbook

It’s like it all came straight out of The Anti-Vaxx Playbook!

“This isn’t someone going in for surgery. Or going in for chemotherapy looking to save their life. This is a perfect healthy person, that wants to remain healthy. But this is about choice, informed consent, and has nothing to do with being anti-vax.”
Texas Senator Bob Hall

Vaccines are safe, with few risks. They are necessary to remain healthy and avoid life-threatening vaccine-preventable diseases! Make the right choice to get vaccinated and protected.

Don’t let them take away the choice of parents who are trying to keep their kids safe. Kids who are too young to be vaccinated or who have true medical contraindications to getting vaccinated.

“I believe that SB 1310 will directly affect Juliana’s health and the health of her heart that was so selflessly donated to her 7 years ago by a gracious family and an infant child named Christopher. Due to Juliana’s heart transplant, she is not able to receive any live vaccines. She can not receive the MMR vaccine, varicella, vaccine, or rotavirus vaccine… SB 1310 will negatively affect immunization rates in the state of Texas by requiring that irrelevant information be presented before obtaining immunization consent as a scare tactic to parents.”
Riki Graves

At a time when we need stronger vaccine laws, it would be reckless is to pass a law that could lead to more vaccine hesitancy and fewer people getting vaccinated and protected.

“I just wanted to ask, now… you said children will die. That’s a pretty strong statement. What do you base that on. Whether you believe in vaccines or not, making a statement like that is… What do you base it on? Because it can be a reckless statement. You know, no one wants to hear ‘Children will die.” So what do you base that on.”
Texas Sen. Donna Campbell

Allison Winnike made the statement that ‘Children will die” in her testimony in opposition to this vaccine bill. It was something a pediatrician had said to her. A pediatrician who was concerned that immunizations might drop if SB 1310 passes, which could lead to even more outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases than we have seen in recent years.

We have already seen the effects of other bad vaccine laws…

The Austin American Statesman published an editorial in 2003 urging Legislators to fix the mess they had just created - allowing personal belief exemptions to vaccination in the state. They didn't. And thanks to similar laws in other states, we went from a record low number of measles cases in 2004, just 37 cases, to the record highs we see today. — The Austin American Statesman published an editorial in 2003 urging Legislators to fix the mess they had just created – allowing personal belief exemptions to vaccination in the state. They didn’t. And thanks to similar laws in other states, we went from a record low number of measles cases in 2004, just 37 cases, to the record highs we see today.

It would be reckless to pass a law, especially during a pandemic, that could possibly lead to more children dying from vaccine-preventable diseases if their parents choose to skip or delay vaccinating their kids.