[NVICAP] ACTION: Help Fight Attack on Philosophical Exemption

[Guest guest]

Dear NVIC Advocacy Team Members,

We don’t often send out a national alert on an issue that is currently

affecting only one state, but this is one that we truly all need to join

together across the country and help fight. Families in Vermont are

facing an unprecedented attack on their rights to make informed

independent vaccination choices by forced vaccination proponents in the

Vermont Legislature. There are 2 bills filed that are attempting to

remove the philosophical exemption to vaccination in Vermont.

One bill has a hearing this Friday and legislators are predictably being

grossly misled.

We need your help to contact every person and organization in Vermont

that you can to alert them about these bills and ask them to please

contact legislators there to oppose S199 and H527.

Below, we’ve posted the alert we sent to Vermont NVIC Advocacy Portal

Members that you can forward to your Vermont contacts. It may be

worthwhile for you to read the explanation of how the vaccination rates

are being misrepresented because this is the same type of manipulation of

numbers that was done in Washington State last session and this way you

will be ready to counter misleading representations of vaccination rates

in your own state.

If you have some time and want to help in another way, please do some

online searches for media articles related to these bills in Vermont and

go to the comment sections and help dispel the misinformation being put

out by the forced vaccination groups. Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,

Dawn , Director of Advocacy

National Vaccine Information Center

http://NVIC.org and

http://NVICAdvocacy.org

Dawn@...

Dear Vermont NVIC Advocacy Team Members,

Your rights to make informed independent vaccination choices for your

family are under attack by forced vaccination proponents in the Vermont

Legislature. We need your timely help to contact legislators to

oppose these actions.

The Senate Health and Welfare committee is holding a

public hearing this Friday February 3rd at 11:00 am on

S199 which is attempting to remove the philosophical exemption

to mandated vaccines in the state of Vermont.

H527 is another bill filed to also try to remove the philosophical

exemption, and it is awaiting a hearing in the House Committee on Health

Care.

We are counting on the families and health care practitioners in Vermont

who want to preserve the right of informed consent to vaccination which

includes the legally protected right to delay or decline vaccines to work

hard to help fight these two bills.

We are asking you to please take the following steps to fight these

bills:

1) Contact members of the Senate Committee on Health and

Welfare and ask them to oppose S199. Explain why this exemption is

important to your family and why the state should offer it.

Senator Ayer

802-759-2748

cayer@...

Senator Mullin sponsor

802-353-6770

kjmbjm@...

Senator Pollina

802-229-5809 or 802-223-6767

apollina@...

apollina@...

Senator Sally Fox

802-860-6428

sfox@...

senatorsallyfox@...

Senator Hinda

802-660-4889

hmiller@...

2) Please consider attending the Senate Health and Welfare

Committee hearing on S199 and offering short testimony against it this

Friday, February 3rd at 11:00 am in the Senate

Chamber.

3) Also contact your state senator and state representative and ask them

to oppose S 199 and H527. If you log in to the NVIC

Advocacy Portal at

http://NVICAdvocacy.org and view

this alert on the Vermont state page, we will automatically lookup who

your legislators are and display them to the right of this alert. You can

click on their names to open up their contact information. This

free confidential service requires your registration and login in order

for us to be able to calculate who you legislators are.

4) Send this to as many friends and family in Vermont that you

can and ask them to please register for the NVIC Advocacy Portal

so they can get added to this email list and receive updates how they can

help fight this bill during this session.

5) Contact all the members of the House Committee on Health Care

and ask them to Oppose H527.

Although H527 has not been set for a hearing yet, your opposition

needs to be communicated now. This could be scheduled any day

now.

Rep. Fisher

(802) 453-5517

mfisher@...

Rep. Copeland-Hanzas

(802) 222-3536

scopelandhanzas@...

Rep. Poirier

(802) 476-7870

ppoirier@...

paulpoirier33@...

Rep. Leigh Dakin

(802) 875-3456

ldakin@...

Rep. Jim Eckhardt

(802) 342-0140

jeckhardt@...

Rep. Patti Komline

(802) 867-4232

pkomline@...

Rep. sey

(802) 442-2092

mmorrissey@...

Rep. Pearson

(802) 860-3933

cpearson@...

Rep. Kristy Spengler

(802) 864-6567

seashre@...

Rep. Till sponsor

(802) 899-2984

gtill@...

Rep. Mark Woodward

(802) 635-7166

mwoodward@...

IMPORTANT CLARIFICATION NEEDS TO BE MADE WITH LEGISLATORS WHO ARE

BEING MISLED

In addition to giving your own reasons why these bills need to be

opposed, it would be great for some to address with the legislators that

Vermont’s vaccination rates have been cited out of context and adjusted

by bill proponents to mislead legislators and obscure the fact that

Vermont health officials have been highly successful at achieving

increasing vaccination rates.

The raw numbers reported by the Centers for Disease Control’s National

Immunization Survey for 2009 and 2010 shown in the chart below illuminate

the improvements that Vermont has made and is not a state with one of the

lowest vaccination rates as bill proponents have misled.

As a matter of fact, the individual rates for each vaccine are quite

high. Also, according to the CDC’s National Immunization Survey in

2010, Vermont ranks 27th out of 50 states and has a higher

overall vaccination rate in the 4:3:1:3:3:1:4 series than the following

states: AL, CA, CO, DE, GA, ID, KY, ME, MD, MO, MT, NV, NJ, NM, NY, OK,

OR, RI, SD, UT, WV, WY and has a higher overall rate than the following

states that DO NOT have a philosophical exemption: AL, DE, GA, KY, MD,

MT, NV, NJ, NY, RI, SD, WY.

Anyone who represents that Vermont has one of the lowest vaccination

rates in the country and that it is because of the philosophical

exemption is being plain dishonest. All of these rates are

obtained directly from the CDC website.

http://www2a.cdc.gov/nip/coverage/nis/nis_iap3.asp?fmt=v & rpt=tab03_antigen_state & qtr=Q1/2010-Q4/2010

http://www2a.cdc.gov/nip/coverage/nis/nis_iap2.asp?fmt=v & rpt=tab03_antigen_state & qtr=Q1/2009-Q4/2009

Vaccine

VT 2009

2009 National

VT 2010

2010 National

OVERALL

4:3:1:3:3:1:4 series

58.4±6.2

63.6±1.3

69.0±6.6

70.2±1.3

3 DTaP

96.1±2.3

95.0±0.6

96.0±3.0

95.0±0.6

4 DTaP

83.2±4.4

83.9±1.0

86.0±4.8

84.4±1.0

3 Polio

92.7±3.2

92.8±0.7

94.4±3.3

93.3±0.7

1 MMR

91.9±3.2

90.0±0.8

92.7±3.3

91.5±0.7

3 Hib

91.4±4.2

83.6±1.0

90.4±5.0

90.4±0.9

3 Hep B

91.5±3.6

92.4±0.7

91.7±3.7

91.8±0.7

1 VAR

82.7±4.7

89.6±0.8

82.9±5.0

90.4±0.8

3 PCV

91.4±3.8

92.6±0.7

92.7±3.5

92.6±0.8

4 PCV

80.9±5.0

80.4±1.1

84.2±5.6

83.3±1.0

(4:3:1:3:3:1:4 - 4 doses of DTaP, 3 doses of polio, 1 dose of MMR, 3

doses of Hib, 3 doses of hepatitis B, 1 dose of varicella vaccine and 4

doses of PCV)

The above vaccination rates show the following:

Vaccination rates in Vermont are not falling, they are substantially

increasing with an overall vaccination rate increase for all doses of all

vaccines in the 4:3:1:3:3:1:4 series of over 10% from 2009 to 2010.

Senator Mullin, the bill author, has been quoted in

recent media articles attributing his reason for filing this bill to

falling vaccination rates, and the raw numbers directly from the CDC

simply do not support his assertion.

The health commissioner

had been quoted in the media lamenting that last year only 60% of

Vermont’s youth have been fully vaccinated while the national rate was

70%. That is simply incorrect as the CDC charts on their web site for

the full vaccination series of 4:3:1:3:3:1:4 show that Vermont’s rate was

69% compared to a 70% national rate. It is important to distinguish that the vaccination rates for each

individual vaccine in Vermont are in the high 80 to mid 90th

percentiles. The overall calculation being cited by bill proponents

represents what percentage of children have ALL DOSES of ALL

vaccines. In this calculation, a child missing the 4th

dose of only one vaccine but has everything else is not counted.

They are not UNVACCINATED as forced vaccination proponents have misled. It is also worth noting that while Vermont’s overall rate of 69% was

just slightly lower than the national rate of 70%, and all the individual

vaccination rates for each vaccine were the same or higher than the

national rate except for the varicella (chicken pox) vaccine. It

was this one vaccine that primarily lowered the overall rate from the

national average. Vermont was one of the last 3 states to add

varicella to the mandated schedule and didn’t do it until recently in

2008, hence the lower rates for this one vaccine which brings the overall

rate down some. As one can tell by this vaccination rate information, if Vermont

health officials really wanted to increase vaccination rates in Vermont,

it would make a lot more sense to focus on the 10% of children simply

failing to obtain the 4th dose of DTaP and the 8% of children

failing to get the 4th dose of PCV rather than eliminating the

philosophical exemption all together for the small percentage of families

who use it. Just helping current vaccinators to finish the

schedule on time would dramatically increase overall vaccination rates.

There is absolutely no justification using the current vaccination

rates for repealing the philosophical exemption.

Sincerely,

Dawn , Director of Advocacy

National Vaccine Information Center

http://NVIC.org and

http://NVICAdvocacy.org

Dawn@...

The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) works diligently to

prepare and disseminate our legislative advocacy action alerts and

supporting materials. We request that organizations and members of

the public forward our alerts in their original form to assure consistent

and accurate messaging and effective action. Please acknowledge NVIC as

originators of this work when forwarding to members of the public and

like-minded organizations. To receive alerts immediately, register

at http://NVICAdvocacy.org, a

website dedicated to this sole purpose and provided as a free public

service by NVIC.

Make

A Difference, support NVIC. NVIC is a certified 501©3

Charity.