The Window of Opportunity to Protect Our Vaccine Freedom is Closing

The Window of Opportunity to Protect Vaccine Freedom is Closing

12th November 2015

By Dr. Joseph Mercola

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

There is a closing window of opportunity for you to make a difference in the cultural vaccine war that’s imploding on us now, and I’m here to tell you what you can do about it.

As noted by Barbara Loe Fisher, president and co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), starting in January of 2015, Americans were slammed with what can only be described as mass hysteria surrounding the measles outbreak in Disneyland.

Patient zero has never been identified. To this day, public health officials still don’t know who brought measles into Disneyland. Yet in no time at all, public health officials joined with pharmaceutical company and medical trade organization lobbyists and immediately started calling for elimination of all non-medical ‘personal belief’ vaccine exemptions — in other words, the right to decline vaccination due to either religious or conscientiously held beliefs.

Orchestrated Mass Hysteria and the March Toward Tyranny

At the beginning of 2015, 48 states allowed a religious vaccine exemption in addition to a medical exemption, and 17 states included a personal, conscientious, or philosophical belief exemption in vaccine laws that require children to get government recommended vaccinations to attend school.

As many of you know, the result of that hysterical demonization of anyone taking a personal belief vaccine exemption resulted in a huge Pharma-funded lobbying campaignin California to take away the personal belief exemption in that state, which encompassed both religious and conscientious beliefs, leaving only the very narrow medical exemption that must be granted by a medical doctor.

The Pharma-Medical Trade government lobbying campaign was successful, despite stronger than ever opposition to the proposed forced vaccination bill (SB277) from thousands of Californians who showed up in droves to object to the bill at a series of legislative public hearings and protest rallies.

California is now only one of three states in the US that will only allow a medical vaccine exemption written by a doctor, for which 99.99 percent of children do not qualify under strict federal guidelines.

Unless you can find a medical doctor to write your child a medical exemption, your child cannot go to day care or attend public or private schools in California without getting multiple doses of 9 or 10 state mandated vaccines (polio, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, haemophilus influenza B (for day care), hepatitis B, measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella zoster (chickenpox).

If you refuse even one federally recommended dose of those vaccines, you are forced to homeschool your child.

“I’m calling it segregation of children who do not have all of the state-mandated and recommended vaccines,” Barbara says, “which is a violation of civil rights. It’s a violation of civil rights not to allow children to get a school education.

It’s very serious. One hundred vaccine-related bills were introduced in this country in January and February of 2015 as a result of this mass hysteria about measles’ cases associated with Disneyland.

In Texas, 20 bills were introduced. In 11 states, the personal belief exemption was attacked for removal.

At the end of the day though, because people stood up and fought back to try to preserve these personal belief exemptions, the state of California was the only one that eliminated the personal belief exemption.

In Vermont, the philosophical exemption was removed but the religious exemption was retained. Now, you have 47 states that have the religious exemption and medical [exemption]. About 16 states left have the philosophical or conscientious belief exemption.”

2015: A Turning Point for the Worse

It seems quite obvious that the Disneyland debacle was a well-coordinated, orchestrated, and carefully-planned event aimed at implementing a strategy to compel vaccine use on everyone, without exceptions.

The Window of Opportunity to Protect Vaccine Freedom is Closing - Disneyland

Not only has California removed the personal belief vaccine exemption for children attending daycare and schools, the legislature also passed a bill to prevent any adult child care worker from being employed in California unless they have received all state-mandated federally recommended vaccines.

Adults and parents who want to volunteer in daycare and child care centers also will not be able to do so unless they’re up-to-date on all of the state-mandated vaccines. Says Barbara:

“This year was really a turning point in the vaccine safety and informed consent movement in the 21st century.

This well-orchestrated move by the pharmaceutical, medical trade, and public health agency alliance to remove all non-medical exemptions, and to do it in such a sweeping way is something I think Americans need to wake up to.

Understand: our freedom is taken away incrementally in this country.

We have to be vigilant and we have to understand that once you walk down this road where you are punishing people if they don’t conform with government policy, that’s a very dangerous road to walk down. We have to take action to protect our freedom.”

Vaccine Rate Tracking Opens the Door for Discrimination

After they successfully took away the personal belief vaccine exemption in California, federal health officials launched a new national vaccine tracking and school safety “rating” system on the CDC’s website, and California launched a similar website at the state level that tracks and rates schools using colored stars based on vaccine uptake.

Using electronic medical records and vaccine tracking systems, California’s website has an interactive map that publishes for each kindergarten and middle school the percentage of children who are in full compliance with state vaccine mandates and how many take personal belief exemptions.

The information includes the names and addresses of the schools in the state; numbers of children enrolled; the personal belief exemption rate; the up-to-date vaccination rate; and the vaccine coverage rates in that school for each state mandated vaccine.

Government health officials then rate each school using a star system — a green star means 95 to 100 percent of the student body is fully vaccinated; a red star indicates less than 79.9 percent are vaccinated.

This is a violation of medical privacy, because let’s say a school has less than 100 students, revealing the percentage rate could make it very easy for parents to figure out who might have a personal belief vaccine exemption, and they may then become targets for discrimination.

“I’m very concerned about this,” Barbara says.”I think it’s outrageous. I wrote a commentary shortly after, saying that if health officials are determined to do this, then they should be very truthful with parents about the real health status’ of children attending schools in this country.

Because the truth is, within the last 30 years, as the government has mandated more and more vaccines for children, we have seen a chronic disease and disability epidemic sweeping through American schools.

Why don’t they also post the numbers of sick days that children have taken in private and public schools? Why not the percentage of children who are chronically ill, disabled, or on medication for things like asthma, diabetes, ADHD, bipolar disorder, and depression – two conditions that have sky rocketed among children in the last few decades?

Why don’t they post the percentage of the children who have HIV, hepatitis B, syphilis, and tuberculosis (TB)? There are children attending our schools who have those transmittable, infectious diseases. Why don’t we know about them?

Why don’t they post the percentage of children who are in special education classes, who have autism and learning disabilities, and the percentage of children who are fully vaccinated or unvaccinated and get infectious diseases? This idea that rating schools in terms of safety that’s connected with the vaccine coverage rate and the personal belief exemption rate, that’s not the only way you characterize the health of a student population.

We have got to put the brakes and put boundaries on the interventions that these public health officials are suggesting. There is no more fundamental a human right than the freedom to decide what you’re going to risk your life or your child’s life for in terms of putting something into your body or the body of your child.

Militarization of Public Health Policy and Medical Fascism

Personally, I believe current government-enforced “no exceptions” vaccination policies can be called medical fascism, and it is easy to connect the dots between the revolving doors of government and industry. If you study history, you will discover that the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — the federal agency responsible for recommending these draconian “one-size-fits-all” forced vaccination policies — was headed up by Dr. Julie Gerberding between 2002 and 2009.

The Window of Opportunity to Protect Vaccine Freedom is Closing - CDC

After spending eight years as the director of the CDC, she went on to become the president of the division of vaccines for Merck, a Pharma giant making billions of dollars marketing vaccines in the U.S. and globally.

She was an insider, and she knows how the CDC works. Now, she’s the president of the drug company that is the sole producer of the measles vaccine in the MMR shot in the U.S., and we have this outbreak of measles at Disneyland in January 2015 that is immediately blown out of all proportion to support oppressive civil rights’ violations to prop up a failing mass vaccination program. Corporate intervention in government is part of the very definition of fascism, and that’s precisely what the pharmaceutical industry is doing, through their aggressive lobbying and their revolving doors.

Revolving Doors Between Industry and Government Must Be Shut

The revolving door between the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the pharmaceutical industry should be prohibited by law. Employees routinely leave these government agencies to go to work for drug companies, and sometimes they rotate back and forth more than once. As noted by Barbara:

“It’s not allowed in any other industries. It’s not allowed in the defense industry. There are at least a certain number of years you have to wait. But there’s a long history of researchers, doctors, and scientists who are associated with the Department of Health and Human Services who are working for pharma and vice versa.

The other thing that I think people don’t realize is the Congress, in the last 30 to 40 years, has given the green light to federal health agencies to create a formal financial public-private partnership with the pharmaceutical industry. When you have a business partnership with someone, you are not going to have a lot of oversight on the safety of the products that your business partner is creating.

This is especially true if the agencies involved in making policy for how we use these vaccines also license them for safety and effectiveness, and use taxpayer dollars to pay advertising agencies and people within HHS to aggressively promote the widespread use of these vaccines.

Now, it’s gone beyond promotion. It’s going into taking out a hammer and clubbing people and saying, ‘You may not function in society unless you have gotten all the government recommended and mandated vaccines.’ There’s no other word for this but ‘tyranny’ because informed consent is a human right. The human right to informed consent to medical risk taking must be protected in this and every country.”

The Window of Opportunity to Protect Our Vaccine Freedom is Closing - The Government Industry Revolving Door

Medical Overreach and Deceptive Advertising

The fall season is upon us, which means being subjected to the usual avalanche of flu vaccine advertisements that go along with it. You can get a flu shot virtually anywhere these days, at your pharmacy, in grocery stores, and in airports. They’re also launching a new adult immunization plan targeting community services locations, such as places of worship and private businesses.

I recently experienced a new level of this aggressive, invasive flu shot marketing. I received both a phone call and a text from a medical clinic I had visited a few years ago for an insurance physical, telling me it’s important that I get a flu shot, and where I could get one. I was outraged, and I called the medical director to give him a piece of my mind.

This is a dramatic example of how they’re reaching into every area of our lives, insisting that getting an annual flu shot is necessary when, in fact, the exact opposite is the case. There’s actually NO evidence that the flu vaccine even works. In many years, it has an exceptionally low effectiveness rate. The three or four influenza strains contained in annual flu shots represent only a fraction of the 200 or so different viruses known to circulate and cause flu-like symptoms each year. In addition, only about 20 percent of suspected influenza cases that occur during the flu season test positive for type A or type B influenza.

If the influenza strains contained in the flu shot aren’t a good match for the strains circulating in any given year, it’s obviously not going to do you much good. For example, CBC News recently reported that, in British Columbia, Canada, this year’s flu vaccine offers only 30 to 50 percent protection.1 Last year’s vaccine was a near total mismatch, offering virtually ZERO protection whatsoever against the viral strains in circulation! Yet, despite that documented fact, people were still told to get their flu shot!

(For more information, please see: Considering the Flu Shot? Here Are Five Reasons to Think Twice.)

Flu Vaccine Is Leading Cause for Vaccine Injury Compensation Among Adults

Why take the risk for near-zero protection? You’d think that a blanket recommendation to get an annual flu vaccine from cradle to grave would be made with a firm base of well-executed, placebo-controlled, randomized, and multi-central trials to prove it was safe and beneficial. But that’s not the case. No such studies have ever been carried out.

Influenza vaccinations are actually among the leading cases in the vaccine injury compensation program (VICP). There are more adults getting awards for influenza vaccine injuries than any other injury in the compensation program. Most injuries receiving compensation are Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS).

“You can be, literally, completely paralyzed from the neck down and not be able to do anything if you get a very severe case of Guillain-Barre Syndrome following vaccination,” Barbara warns. “People need to wake up and understand that you need to get information about not only influenza but the risks and failures associated with these flu vaccines.

There are many manufacturers now who are manufacturing flu vaccines, because it’s such a lucrative market now that the government has said that every year, every single American from the age of six months through the year of death, have to get a flu shot.”

As time goes on we’re also realizing there’s a lot we don’t understand about how vaccines work and how viruses mutate. For example, the 2012 to 2013 flu vaccine was also ineffective, and research2 shows that this vaccine failure was not due to mutations in the circulating virus. Instead, the vaccine did not work due to mutations in the egg-adapted H3N2 vaccine strain (meaning the viral strain used in the vaccine),causing a mismatch to the circulating strain.

Research3 published in 2013 also showed that getting vaccinated against one strain of influenza raises your risk of severe infection from a related but different influenza strain. So are annual flu shots making Americans’ health better, or worse?

Vaccine Makers Are Not Liable for Harm

When I first started practicing medicine in the mid ’80s, flu vaccines were recommended for people over 65 and for those with cardio-respiratory pulmonary illness. That probably covers less than 10 percent of the population. Then around the year 2000, the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee suggested that everybody over age 50 should get vaccinated.

“Then, in the following decade, every year, or every other year, they brought more age groups into the influenza vaccine net until finally, a couple of years ago, the CDC said, ‘Every single person, all 321 million Americans from the age of six months through year of death, has to get influenza vaccine,'” Barbara says.

“Now, if you’re an influenza vaccine manufacturer, you’ve got dollar signs in your eyes. That’s an incredible market; many tens of billions of dollars. Because guess what?

There is no liability associated with any of these influenza vaccines, or any vaccine that’s recommended and licensed by government, in this country. You cannot sue a vaccine manufacturer for any reason if you or your child gets hurt by influenza vaccine or any other vaccination. What a dream market. It’s a drug company stockholder’s dream and a consumer’s worst nightmare.”

The Vaccine Policy Is a Money Making Racket

And the nightmare is only getting worse. Researchers are working on a universal flu vaccine, and there’s evidence such a vaccine may have dire consequences if they get it wrong. They’re also genetically engineering vaccines, and creating novel adjuvants, such as the squalene-type adjuvants that have been associated with narcolepsy and other kinds of autoimmune disorders. As noted by Barbara:

“There is a green light for drug companies with this public-private partnership to basically do what they want. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the 21st Century Cures Act, which has gone through the House of Representatives. It was introduced earlier this year. It proposes to lower the FDA standards to be applied to these companies when they want to license new vaccines. Lowering the standards rather than raising them means greasing the skids even more.

The pharmaceutical industry is the number one lobbyist up on Capitol Hill and in the state legislatures. Almost $1 trillion dollars every year is given by Congress to the Department of Health and Human Services. [For comparison], the Department of Defense gets about $500 billion. So the Department of Health and Human Services is the number one agency in this country that gets the most amount of our federal taxes every year, and that doesn’t include Social Security because the Social Security Administration is a separate agency.

If you look at all that money, where are the scientific studies we’ve been calling for — the bench science that goes down to the cellular, molecular level to look at what happens in the body, in our brains, and immune systems, when you use adjuvants to ramp up the response of the immune system? Those of us who have autoimmune disease in our family, or neurological disorders, are sitting ducks for these new ways they want to ramp up the immune system response to vaccination…It is truly a shot in the dark and it’s not right.

The Window of Opportunity to Protect Vaccine Freedom is Closing - Freedom

To Protect Your Freedom, You Need to Get Involved in the Political Process

If you value your freedom, you have to become more involved in the political process. In 2010, the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) launched the NVIC Advocacy Portal — a free online interactive communications tool.

By signing up as a user, you will receive an email whenever legislation is moving at the state or federal level that relates to vaccine policy and your ability to make vaccine choices. Contact information is provided, allowing you to contact your state legislator or federal representative to make your voice heard. The NVIC will provide you with information about the pending legislation, as well as talking points.

“It’s about education. It’s about participating in the proce

ss and standing up for your rights. We can take back our freedoms and protect our civil and human rights, but only if millions of us get involved.”

Barbara says. “The NVIC Advocacy Portal is part of the reason we were able to protect the personal belief exemptions in nine of the 11 states that tried to take it away, because we were able to communicate with everyone who was on the Portal in that state. They were able to be in contact with each other. We were able to tell them when hearings were being held, and they would show up at the hearings, and hold other meetings.”

Freedom Is a ‘God-Given’ Right, But Defending It Is a Personal Responsibility

If we want to be victorious in this vaccine culture war, we can benefit from lessons learned. We failed to stop the forced vaccination lobby in California this year, but we were successful in states like Texas, where 20 bad vaccine bills were defeated!

The key is to get empowered, join the NVIC Advocacy Portal and get involved. We the people need to educate our legislators. It really is a war against personal freedom, and we need to put in the time now and prepare for these battles rather than wait until another inevitable legislative effort comes along and rips away even more freedom right from under our nose. As Barbara says:

“It’s beyond the 11th hour, but I think we have to have courage and we have to have faith. We have to know that we can turn it around and do what we can every day, no matter how small. Even if it’s just a conversation with your neighbor or a family member. I know it’s not easy because

this conversation has become so polarized.

You’re either a pro or you’re an anti, even if you try to take an informed consent position, which is a rational and ethical position to take — that you have the right to be fully informed about the risk associated with any medical intervention or pharmaceutical product like a vaccine, and be able to make an informed and voluntary decision. We need to make it a different kind of conversation…

The media is calling for the de-licensing of any physician who doesn’t promote the use of all government-recommended vaccines, and the imprisonment of parents who did not give their children every government-recommended vaccine. It’s gotten completely out of control. The rhetoric is something I never thought I’d see in America.”

Upcoming Vaccine Information Facebook Event

On Thursday evening, November 12th, from 9 to 10 p.m. ET, Barbara and I will be holding a vaccine information event on Facebook. We’ll feature short videos, and information about the programs and services of the NVIC. Various staff members will also be highlighting different programs and services available at the NVIC, all of which relate to education and advocacy. I hope you’ll join us, and that you’ll invite your friends and family to this important information-packed event.

Please Support the NVIC, and Join the NVIC Advocacy Portal

The NVIC Advocacy Portal is a free tool that everyone can use to become better informed about vaccine issues, and it also helps you engage in the political process. I strongly encourage you to join. I also urge you to support the NVIC financially. During Vaccine Awareness Week, I will match your donations dollar for dollar.

The window of opportunity to turn this dystopian nightmare around is closing. We can still make a difference, but eventually — if we fail to stand together — that window of opportunity will slam shut, and none of us, anywhere, will have the freedom of making vaccine choices.

“On NVIC.org, you can read about the pain and suffering of people in this country on our Vaccine Freedom Wall. We have several years of comments from people about how they suffered when they tried to go to doctor’s offices and make vaccine choices, or they try to get their children into school. It’s really an amazing testimony to just what we’re talking about here…

Unfortunately, the medical schools and the health care professionals in this country are only getting one side of the story and they’re not really being educated, and then they go into practice and then they take that bias with them. It’s such a sad thing to see when everyone should be working together to try to increase the health of our country and individuals and not just implement government policy. That is not truly informed government policy because the science is not there. They haven’t done the science that needs to be done.”

mercola vaccine awareness

Help Support Vaccine Awareness Week

We are currently holding Vaccine Awareness Week (until November 15th). With aggressive efforts by pharmaceutical companies, medical trade groups, and the government to restrict or eliminate all non-medical vaccine exemptions, it’s critical for you to act now to protect your legal right to make informed, voluntary vaccine choices.

Thankfully we have organizations such as the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) to provide information on vaccine safety and informed consent protection in the public health system. This group’s mission is to prevent vaccine injuries and death, through public education and defending your right to informed consent.

Resources Where You Can Learn More

  • NVIC Advocacy Portal: Become an effective vaccine choice advocate in your state and defend your legal right to make voluntary vaccine choices for yourself and your children.
  • Ask 8 Vaccine Information Kiosk: Download brochures on vaccines and how to recognize vaccine reaction symptoms, as well as posters and web badges, to help you educate your family and friends when you advocate for vaccine freedom of choice.
  • Vaccine Ingredients Calculator: Create your customized plan for a safer vaccine
  • State Law & Vaccine Requirements: You can easily access your state’s vaccine policies and laws here.
  • Guide to Flu & Flu Vaccines: This Mini Guide to Flu and Flu Vaccines is a brief summary of facts about influenza and influenza vaccines.

Let’s Help NVIC Get the Funding They Deserve

This charitable organization has been working since 1982 to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths through public education and to provide information and counseling to those reporting vaccine adverse responses.

Please consider donating to NVIC to help support their mission and join the vaccine awareness movement today.

Article sources:

Previous Articles by Dr. Mercola:

About the author:

Dr. Joseph MercolaBorn and raised in the inner city of Chicago, IL, Dr. Joseph Mercola is an osteopathic physician trained in both traditional and natural medicine. Board-certified in family medicine, Dr. Mercola served as the chairman of the family medicine department at St. Alexius Medical Center for five years, and in 2012 was granted fellowship status by the American College of Nutrition (ACN).

While in practice in the late 80s, Dr. Mercola realized the drugs he was prescribing to chronically ill patients were not working. By the early 90s, he began exploring the world of natural medicine, and soon changed the way he practiced medicine.

In 1997 Dr. Mercola founded www.Mercola.com, which is now routinely among the top 10 health sites on the internet. His passion is to transform the traditional medical paradigm in the United States. “The existing medical establishment is responsible for killing and permanently injuring millions of Americans… You want practical health solutions without the hype, and that’s what I offer.”

Visit www.Mercola.com for more information, or read Dr. Mercola’s full bio and résumé here.


If you've ever found value in our articles, we'd greatly appreciate your support by purchasing Mindful Meditation Techniques for Kids - A Practical Guide for Adults to Empower Kids with the Gift of Inner Peace and Resilience for Life.

In the spirit of mindfulness, we encourage you to choose the paperback version. Delve into its pages away from screen glare and notifications, allowing yourself to fully immerse in the transformative practices within. The physical book enriches the learning process and serves as a tangible commitment to mindfulness, easily shared among family and friends.

Over the past few years, Wake Up World has faced significant online censorship, impacting our financial ability to stay online. Instead of soliciting donations, we're exploring win-win solutions with our readers to remain financially viable. Moving into book publishing, we hope to secure ongoing funds to continue our mission. With over 8,500 articles published in the past 13 years, we are committed to keeping our content free and accessible to everyone, without resorting to a paywall.