Believe it or not, parents have been jailed for not vaccinating their kids.
In a recent Michigan case, a mother was jailed for refusing a court order to vaccinate her son. The court had agreed with the boy’s father that the child should be vaccinated and protected.
So this case was not just about vaccines, but about divorced parents who disagreed about how to care for their child…
Can You Go to Jail for Not Vaccinating Your Kids?
Although it isn’t common, historically, there have been other stories of parents going to jail for not vaccinating their kids.
Parents in Maryland were surprised that they might face jail time for not vaccinating their kids.
Recently, in 2007, parents were warned that they might be sent to jail for not vaccinating their kids. The problem wasn’t just vaccines though, as these parents could have gotten exemptions. And they had several months to do so before the Judge gave his warning…
No one went to jail in Maryland in 2007.
Have you ever heard of John (Jack) Marsh?
In 1946, he was put in jail and his daughter, Betty Jane, was taken by child welfare services so that she could get a smallpox vaccine. His son Marlin was also to be taken, but couldn’t be found.
What happened next? We don’t know. That was the last report about John Marsh and his family.
We do know a lot about what happened before this though…
John Marsh’s story started nearly 12 years earlier!
In 1934, he spent 7 months in jail because he wouldn’t vaccinate his children Daniel and Lorna. As in 1946, those children were taken and vaccinated and Marsh was released.
He was also put in prison in 1937 over getting his son Eugene vaccinated.
Why was he against vaccinating his kids?
John Marsh believed that his nieces were vaccine injured.
He believes that a smallpox vaccine caused two of his nieces to go blind. One of them became blind about two weeks after getting her smallpox vaccine. Two weeks later, her sister also became blind. And then another.
What could have affected these girls in 1925 besides Mildred’s smallpox vaccine? Trachoma was once a common cause of blindness in the United States and it was quite contagious.
Even though two weren’t even vaccinated, the family still thinks that they all suffered from some kind of vaccine injury.
“The infrequency of eye involvement following vaccination is very striking when we consider the number of vaccinations, the doubtful handling that many receive, and the ease with which infection may be transferred.”
Arthur J. Bedell, M.D., F.A.C.S. on Multiple Vaccination of the Eyelids
Interestingly, ocular vaccinia is a known, rare complication of getting a smallpox vaccine. It could occur if you touched the site of vaccination and then touched your eye, and so could also occur if you were in close contact with someone who was recently vaccinated, as the Marsh sisters.
Unlike these girls though, the infection typically only involves one eye, would cause lesions suspicious for vaccinia in or near the eye, which were never mentioned, and often leaves obvious lid deformities.
And doctors did not believe that those girls had a reaction to the vaccine.
John Marsh never won any of his cases and his kids always ended up getting vaccinated…
Are there any other cases of parents going to jail instead of vaccinating their kids?
In 1899, apparently there wasn’t a religious exemption to getting vaccinated.Yes, we had anti-vax chiropractors way back in 1926.
In 1942, Bowser’s two children were admitted to a county Children’s home and vaccinated, as they had never been to school.
This was in 1924, but just like today, these parents didn’t win their court case.
Could any of this happen now?
We still have truancy laws and laws about kids getting vaccinated…
Jack Marsh had an alternative to going to jail over not vaccinating his kids…
But no one wants parents to go to jail over vaccination decisions.
And no one wants kids to be forced to get vaccines.
Vaccination laws were being strictly enforced to try and control outbreaks and epidemics of smallpox, which still occurred in the 1920s and 30s.
We also don’t want kids to get sick and disease to spread because of ignorance and unnecessary fear of vaccines.
Unfortunately, anti-vax folks create a viscous cycle.
As they scare more and more parents, they create pockets of susceptible children, and larger and larger outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, which eventually require stricter vaccine requirements and mandates to control.
What Bobby Kennedy is talking about though, that Federal Study, is a report, Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (ESP:VAERS), that was conducted at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc.
“Preliminary data were collected from June 2006 through October 2009 on 715,000 patients, and 1.4 million doses (of 45 different vaccines) were given to 376,452 individuals. Of these doses, 35,570 possible reactions (2.6 percent of vaccinations) were identified.”
Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (ESP:VAERS)
The study identified all possible reactions, including minor reactions, like pain and fever, and wasn’t looking at just vaccine injuries, unless that is what you consider to be a vaccine injury. And since the study was looking at VAERS and possible reactions, they were not even necessarily causally related to the vaccines that the kids were given.
“Slide 3 is a table from HHS’s 2016 Neiss-Cades survey published in JAMA reporting an astonishing 19.5% of children under five who are admitted to emergency rooms for drug reactions are suffering vaccine injuries.”
Bobby Kennedy
What kind of vaccine injuries?
They are vaccination reactions – any adverse effect from a vaccine. They could be fever, hives, or a febrile seizure – we don’t know. Importantly, only a very small percentage of those kids who went to the ER were hospitalized.
And they use the term side effects for the more temporary reactions that are thought to be caused by a vaccine.
All of these vaccine adverse events can be reported to VAERS online or using a downloadable form.
That’s very unlike those folks who consider anything and everything that happens after a child is vaccinated, even if it is many months later, to be a vaccine injury, including things like ADHD, diabetes, and autism, etc.
How many doses of vaccines have been given during the time that the $4 billion was paid out? How many lives were saved because they didn’t get polio, measles, and Hib, etc.?
Oh, these folks…
About That 4 Billion Dollars Taxpayers Have Paid for Vaccine Injuries…
So, is it true?
Have taxpayers paid 4 billion dollars for vaccine injuries and deaths, like their signs say?
While the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 did set up a $0.75 vaccine excise tax to fund the Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund, it is the vaccine manufacturers who pay the tax.
And billions and billions of doses of vaccines (over 3.5 billion just since 2006) have been given since 1989, the time since the $4,060,857,713.42 has been paid by the Vaccine Court. The payment has been for 6,355 compensated claims over those thirty years, most of which are for vaccine injuries, not deaths. Fewer than 10% of Vaccine Court cases are for vaccine deaths.
Does that matter?
That’s about 1 compensated claim, the majority of which are settled, in about 775 thousand doses. So not quite 1 in a million…
It does if you consider that many more kids would die if we didn’t routinely vaccinate and protect our kids!
“Analyses showed that routine childhood immunization among members of the 2009 US birth cohort will prevent ∼42 000 early deaths and 20 million cases of disease, with net savings of $13.5 billion in direct costs and $68.8 billion in total societal costs, respectively.”
Zhou et al on Economic Evaluation of the Routine Childhood Immunization Program in the United States, 2009
Has Bobby Kennedy Taken Over the Anti-Vaccine Movement?
What did he have to say?
“It’s a sad day for California. And it’s a sad day for our country. And I have asked a question and I would like to ask this legislature who voted for this God awful bill. If we can give government and big industries the right to inject untested medical products that are zero liability into our children coercively, where does the power of government end? What else can they order us to do? Can they do the same thing that they do in China? Which is to tell people that they have to abort their babies for “the good of society?” Can they euthanize people for “the good of society?” Where is the legal boundary?
Bobby Kennedy
It is a sad day when a Kennedy is spouting this kind of stuff…
Vaccines are well tested and everyone has a choice on whether or not to get vaccinated. Mandates to attend school do not force parents to vaccinate their kid.
Comparing these mandates that protect those who can’t be vaccinated to forced abortion and euthanasia is unconscionable.
“We have signed treaty after treaty after treaty saying you can not force an American citizen or any citizen of the civilized world to take a medication or to submit themselves to a medical procedure without informed consent. What has happened to the Democratic party? What has happened to the party that used to stand for listening to women? Why are they listening to pharmaceutical companies and not to the women?
Bobby Kennedy
What has happened to the Kennedys?
Again, vaccine mandates do not force anyone to get vaccinated and protected.
“And yet, you have all of the members who voted for this and none of them can answer the question – where is all of the autoimmune diseases coming from? If it’s not the vaccines, then where is it coming from? We have, from my generation, according to HHS, 12% of the people in my generation, prior to 1986, had chronic diseases. Today, 54% did. Let’s pretend all of those hundreds and hundreds of studies aren’t there that say it’s the vaccines.”
Actually, let’s not, because it isn’t true. Although often cited by anti-vaccine folks, the number comes from a 2011 report, A national and state profile of leading health problems and health care quality for US children: key insurance disparities and across-state variations, but doesn’t mean what most people think it means.
“An estimated 43% of US children (32 million) currently have at least 1 of 20 chronic health conditions assessed, increasing to 54.1% when overweight, obesity, or being at risk for developmental delays are included; 19.2% (14.2 million) have conditions resulting in a special health care need, a 1.6 point increase since 2003.”
Bethell et al on A national and state profile of leading health problems and health care quality for US children: key insurance disparities and across-state variations.
Is obesity a vaccine injury?
Where are the “hundreds and hundreds of studies… that say it’s the vaccines?”
“Let’s pretend that all the vaccines, everyone of those diseases, the autoimmune diseases – Guillain-Barré syndrome , cerebral palsy, diabetes, Rheumatoid arthritis. The neurodevelopmental diseases, ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette syndrome, ASD, autism. The allergic diseases – allergies, food allergies, eczema, asthma, anaphylaxis. Where can we find those listed? In two places. One in the list of chronic diseases that are now epidemic among American children and on the vaccine inserts. And why would the company put them on the vaccine insert? They put them there because the only way you can sue them under NCVIA is if they know or suspect of an injury being caused by a product and they failed to put it on the insert. So it’s the one place where their honest. For many years they told us, well, just because we put it on the insert, it doesn’t mean that it is actually a vaccine adverse event or caused by the vaccine. But the code of Federal regulations says you can not put it on an insert unless you believe that it’s caused by the vaccine. So they are lying.”
Bobby Kennedy
Well, someone is lying…
Although listed in the vaccine insert, if they are in the Adverse Reactions section, they may not actually be caused by the vaccine.
What goes into a vaccine insert is dictated by the FDA, specifically the Code of Federal Regulations Title 21, and Section 314 of the NCVIA, after consultation with the Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines, including:
Warning and Precautions – all adverse reactions and safety hazards that may occur after getting the vaccine and what you should do if they occur
Adverse Reactions – this section includes clinical trials experience, post-marketing experience, and voluntary reports, and it is very important to understand that it is not always possible to establish a causal relationship to vaccination for these adverse effects. So just because something is listed here, whether it is SIDS, autism, drowning, or a car accident, doesn’t mean that it was actually caused by the vaccine. Updated in 2006 to require that only adverse events “for which there is some basis to believe there is a causal relationship between the drug and the occurrence of the adverse event,” it still doesn’t mean the adverse event was definitely caused by the vaccine.
As a lawyer, you would expect, or at least hope, that Bobby Kennedy understands how vaccine inserts really work…
“This state is doing something horrendous. It is stepping between a doctor and the 4000 children in this state whose doctors have told them you can not afford to get a vaccine because it could kill you or it could cripple you. Their doctor, who has known that child often-times since birth, who has reviewed the medical records, who has done all of the tests on that baby, who knows the family, has said it is dangerous to receive this product. Don’t ever do it. And yet, the State of California, is going to come in, a bureaucrat, between that doctor and that child, and say that we are going to give it to him anyway. This is criminal.”
Bobby Kennedy
This is probably one of the biggest myths about California’s new vaccine law.
Did Ron Kennedy know these kids since birth and think that vaccines would kill or cripple them because they had a learning disability or food allergies?
And the problem hasn’t typically been the legitimate medical exemptions from doctors who have known kids since birth, but rather inappropriate exemptions from doctors who advertised medical exemption consultations and appointments for new patients.
“Big pharmaceutical companies are the most evil companies on earth. Who are commoditizing our children. Who are giving our children this tsunami of chronic disease and then making the money to try and tell us that we are going to get rid of infectious disease, like chickenpox and measles, but we are going to trade that for rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes and autism and ADD and ADHD. And all of those infectious diseases are treatable and curable, usually within a week, and none of the chronic diseases that they are causing are treatable or curable. And they are making $50 billion dollars selling our kids these mandated vaccines that are untested and liability free, but they are making $500 billion a year selling them the epi-pens, the seizure medications, the Prozac, the albuterol inhalers, the rhumatoid arthritis medication, the diabetes medications that our children are now addicted to for life because of these vaccines. ”
Bobby Kennedy thinks the pharmaceutical industry is in “a war against our children.” Do you?
So what’s their next plan?
Lawsuits.
Lawsuits so that they can help keep kids unvaccinated and unprotected.
“We are an insurgency. They can not stop us now. We are not going to go away.”
Bobby Kennedy
Of course the anti-vaccine movement is not going away. It has been around since before we had the first real vaccine, when folks were getting variolated to protect them against smallpox.
“You know this is the most important battle, probably in human history.”
“What we have to understand is that the domination of business by government is called communism. The domination of government by business is called facism. And what we’re fighting for is the essential tenets of American democracy, which is free market capitalism, which we don’t have. They destroyed the markets didn’t they. There’s no market for vaccines because they couldn’t sell them, so they had to disable the markets and force us to take them against our will. And for democracy and they’ve taken democracy from us. And they’ve taken the institution of Justice directly. They have gotten rid of the 6th and 7th amendment guarantees. The Federal Constitution guarantees of a jury trials. We are the only people in our country who you can injure – a private corporation can injure and disable and you can’t get a jury trial.”
Bobby Kennedy
Except that you can’t usually get a jury trial if you think you have a vaccine injury. The only thing is that you have to go through the Vaccine Court first.
