Letter to HHS Secretary Azar on Contradictory Vaccine Safety Positions Held by HHS, CC Maine Governors

November 11, 2018

Dear Secretary Azar,

I am the mother of a vaccine injured child, and I am looking for an explanation as to how four of your departments within HHS can hold four different positions on the question: “Do Vaccines Cause Autism?”

At present, as the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, you currently hold four incompatible positions on the relationship between vaccines and autism in the four different departments that you manage and that contribute information to the public on vaccine safety.

In answering the question, “Are vaccines linked to autism?” Your responses are:

The Health Resources Services Administration‘s position is: Yes.

David Bowman, a spokesman for HHS’s Health Resources and Services Administration commenting on a case of vaccine encephalopathy and autism responded:

[Vaccine Induced] Encephalopathy may be accompanied by a medical progression of an array of symptoms including autistic behavior, autism, or seizuresi.”

The Food and Drug Administration’s position can be summed up as: Maybe sometimes.


On the FDA approved Tripedia vaccine insert:

“Adverse events reported during post-approval use of Tripedia vaccine include idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, SIDS, anaphylactic reaction, cellulitis, autism, convulsion/grand mal convulsion, encephalopathy, hypotonia, neuropathy, somnolence and apnea. Events were included in this list because of the seriousness or frequency of reporting. Because these events are reported voluntarily from a population of uncertain size, it is not always possible to reliably estimate their frequencies or to establish a causal relationship to components of Tripedia vaccineii.”

The National Institutes of Health‘s position can be summed up as: Probably not.


While NIH has not responded to my request for an official position statement on the matter, Dr. Francis Collins wrote on June 13
th of 2017 in his NIH Director’s Blog, in a post entitled Autism Spectrum Disorder: Progress Toward Earlier Diagnosis:

“Research shows that the roots of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) generally start early—most likely in the womb. That’s one more reason, on top of a large number of epidemiological studies, why current claims about the role of vaccines in causing autism can’t be rightiii.”


The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assert: Absolutely not.


On their page on the relationship between vaccines and autism:

“Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism.”iv

“There is no link between vaccines and autism.”

“Vaccine ingredients do not cause autism.”

This position, which contradicts its three sister agencies, is only made more untenable as the Director of the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Branch, Frank DeStefano, told reporter Sharyl Attkisson in a recorded interview when asked if vaccines can cause autism that, “that is a possibility. It’s hard to predict who those children might be, but certainly, individual cases can be studied to look at those possibilities.v

DeStefano, the man responsible for the CDC’s public position that, “Vaccines do not cause Autism,” “there is no link between vaccines and autism,” and “vaccine ingredients do not cause autism,” admits not only that it is possible that vaccines do cause autism, but confesses that the has never completely looked to see if vaccines can cause autism. Further, his own research has found at least three different links between vaccines and autism, on a population basis, that he failed to disclose to the publicvi vii.

Agencies that report to you therefore hold multiple and mutually exclusive opinions on this same subject. This should be enough to trigger a systematic review of the information each agency is using, what biases are causing this wide range of positions, and whether or not bad faith motives and actions are in play.

Further, both NIHviii and CDCix, are multiple vaccine patent holders, which is not disclosed to the public at the point of sale, but can only be discovered by digging through patent information on the internetx. HHS, while posing as an impartial agency to research, regulate, and recommend vaccines via NIH, FDA and CDC respectively, and as “vaccine court” via HRSA to determine vaccine injury causation in individual consumer claims, is robbing the consumer of informed consent by failing to disclose that it is a profit partner in the very shots they are allowing to be administered to themselves or their minor children.

But even beyond that, these vaccine safety statements (save Bowman’s) ignore more than a hundred research papers that demonstrate multiple links between vaccines and autism, and the mechanisms by which vaccines and their ingredients can cause autismxi, as well as at least 83 documented vaccine-induced encephalopathy with autism claims paid by the Vaccine Injury Compensation Programxii.

Because of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act that has circumvented the 7th Amendment rights of Americans to sue for vaccine injury and death, the program has become vastly corrupt, as public oversight was removed, Congressional oversight legally required by the 1986 Act has not been exercisedxiii, and Administrations over the years have both ignored and advanced the corruption. Your predecessors actually facilitated the fraud, teaching physicians falsehoods about the safety profiles of the products that they were pushing doctors to administer, and withholding from them the education that they needed to prevent injury in their patients, and to recognize and treat it when it occurred.

That is the broken and dangerous system you have inherited, and are now accountable for.

If you choose to leave the system and it’s fraud in place unassessed and unreformed, then you too join them in making the medical professionals who believe they are serving the health interests of their patients into men and women engaging in “wicked” acts, because you have chosen to pay attention to falsehoods.

While what I have written to you above is the simplest simplest description that I can offer you of the corruption burden you are now holding, the fraud runs deep, as it would have to in order to stay in place. So as to not give you a lengthy reiteration of all of the serious problems that need to be addressed in this letter, I am including a copy of a piece I wrote for the Johns Hopkins Journal, Narratives in Bioethics, for their issue published in January of last year on vaccine choices. It is entitled, “Families are Under No Obligation to Put Their Children at Risk By Participating in the Corrupt Current US National Immunization Programxiv,” and it enumerates the vast and serious unaddressed brokenness in vaccination in the US. It is my public statement on why we will no longer participate in the US National Vaccine Plan.

To say that this program, and the deception it represents, has harmed our family would be an understatement. Our son suffered two serious reactions, neither of which was recognized or treated by our pediatricians, and which have resulted in brain damage (and an “autism” diagnosis) that we have been left with the responsibility of treating ourselves. We did this without the help of the medical establishment that harmed him, and paid for his medical treatment out of our own pockets.

America’s vaccine program harmed our son, and is still actively preventing him from even being assessed for a vaccine induced brain injury 14 years after it took place. As it has done to untold thousands of hurting families with harmed loved ones who cannot get proper care and support.

Every day that the fraud in this program is left unaddressed, more children are being needlessly harmed as families are denied their right to true informed consent on vaccine safety.

Additionally, I want to give you a picture of what these harmful policies are doing at the state level. In 2015, in Maine, families that wanted to retain their right to vaccinate their children as was their personal choice, were under attack. It was at this time that these three bills were introduced to restrict and remove their right to school vaccine exemptions. In response, we introduced our own bill, The Maine Vaccine Consumer Protection Act, that would, among other things, require that physicians and medical professionals be mandated an education on vaccine risk, injuries, contraindications and adverse outcomes via the vaccine package insert and the HRSA Vaccine Injury Compensation Program Table. The results were stunning.

Physicians and medical professionals opposed the bill with nonsense answers. They didn’t even know what the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was, and confused it with the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting system. Their testimony proved that they knew nothing about federal vaccine safety guidelines, and don’t even know enough to cover up that they don’t know it. They did not know of the existence of the program that was implemented to replace vaccine injury liability, and provide support and care for their vaccine injured patients. There is no way for the VICP even have a pretense of functioning when a state chapter president of the American Academy of Pediatrics does not know it exists.

We went farther, and reported our largest state medical provider to the Maine Department of Health and Human Resources for making fraudulent vaccine safety claims, when they stated on Maine Public Radio that several vaccinated v. unvaccinated studies had been performed and found no difference in autism rates between the two groups. No such research exists. The state replied that they found no reason to inspect a facility, and simply closed the case.

I have attached the summary of our findings, entitled, “Maine Immunization Program Safety Gapsxv,” which include descriptions of these, and several other actions we took that demonstrate that open fraud and malpractice can be practiced in regards to vaccination, and there is no way for members of the public to address them through any official channel.

Finally, while no help is offered to us, what families like ours are given for reporting our children’s vaccine injuries, need for care, and even health and functioning improvements via alternative medicine (paid for out of our pockets) are insults. To advocate for vaccine safety and program reform means that you will be called, “anti-vaccine,” “anti-science,” “delusional” and a “danger to society.” Vaccine injury families are the last group in America that it is OK to mock, ostracize, demonize and harass.

This second class citizen treatment is justified by those who perpetrate it because The Department of Health and Human Services allows the lie that, “Vaccines are safe,” to continue to circulate, despite the fact that it is the position of all three branches of the US Government that, “Vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.”

Mr. Azar, I do not envy your position. It is likely that you yourself have been a victim of this fraud in your own work, implementing vaccine practices which you believed to be science based, while being deceived by those who came before you in this arena. Most of the physicians who have come to understand that the risk in the vaccine program was much higher than they were being told have experienced a great deal of emotional difficulty facing the painful truth that they were being used by those whose agendas were those other than the health of patients. Parents who only have one or two children that they unknowingly allowed to be put in harms way, experience a great deal of suffering. Doctors and public health officials who did so for hundreds or thousands of children, sometimes much more so.

Further, we all know that the ship of state is difficult to turn, and a program this vast will not change with ease, but it has to be done. Fortunately we have a President who understands that there is a problem to be addressed and made that clear in his campaign. So I hope that you will begin to focus there now.

Our family needs relief. We have suffered a great deal, and we want it to end. Fiscally and morally responsible ways to address this issue are available because our families have searched for them. I stand ready to help you end this abuse of power that is destroying families and decimating our children.

Sincerely,

Ginger Taylor, MS

Director
Maine Coalition for Vaccine Choice

CC: Maine Governor Paul LePage
CC: Maine Attorney General Janet T. Mills
CC: Maine Department of Health and Human Services Acting Commissioner Bethany Hamm

xivNarrative Inquiry in Bioethics, vol. 6 no. 3, 2016, pp. 181-185. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/646617.

xvMaine Immunization Program Safety Gaps, White Paper Summary, Maine Coalition for Vaccine Choice, June 16, 2017

 

No response has been received from Mr. Azar, Governor LePage, Governor Mills or Commissioner Hamm