A Look Inside The Immunization Dilemma

Actors Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, McCarthy’s autistic son, Evan, and Carrey’s daughter march in a rally to protest chemicals in vaccines in June 2008 in Washington, D.C.

THE POWER OF ONE

Congress recognized that vaccines may have the ability to injure and kill children in 1986, when it passed the National Vaccine Injury Act, in response to a large number of lawsuits being filed claiming vaccines were causing adverse reactions including brain damage and death. The act serves to compensate victims and to protect medical professionals and vaccine manufacturers from liability if an individual suffered injury from receiving vaccines. This means doctors and pharmaceutical companies cannot be sued for injuries resulting from their products, and the government will essentially pay victims in the event an injury can be proven in connection with a vaccine.

“Exactly 25 years ago, in May 1986, I joined with mothers and fathers whose babies died after DPT shots and gave a presentation to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta,” says the National Vaccine Information Center’s Fisher. “We told physician members of the CDC’s vaccine policy-making committee, who wanted state legislators to strictly enforce laws legally requiring children to get 23 doses of seven vaccines starting at 2 months through age 6, that doctors did not really know how many children were dying after vaccination.”

More than 300,000 cases of adverse reactions to vaccines have been reported to the federal government since then, including permanent, life-threatening disabilities, illnesses and death. Since 1988, the government has awarded compensation to more than 1,300 families whose children suffered brain damage from vaccines, totaling more than $2 billion.

“You can read the transcript of that 1986 CDC meeting on NVIC’s website and decide for yourself whether anything has really changed in 25 years,” she says. “Except the fact that, now, public health officials are ordering doctors to give children 48 doses of 14 vaccines starting on day of birth through age 6, with half of those doses given before age 1.”

For parents attempting to avoid these shots altogether, they have few options if their child doesn’t have a medical reason for exemption: homeschooling or God.