When Government Forces Parents’ Hands on Vaccines: A Response to Paul Offit

June 29, 2017December 10, 2018Vaccines

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If anyone wanted any more proof that vaccine fanatics were becoming even more radicalized and authoritarian they need look no further than Paul Offit’s June 18th article for the Daily Beast entitled “When Parents Force the Government’s Hand on Vaccines.”

Offit’s article does not read so much as an opinion piece as it is a threat almost visibly looking down his nose at parents who do not vaccinate while hinting rather openly that if they continue on their current path the government itself may have to step in and force them to change their ways.

Offit does his best during the course of the article to frighten the reader with visions of dead and dying children from allegedly vaccine-preventable diseases and to make a constitutional case for forced vaccination.

What Offit actually accomplishes is revealing himself and the rest of his clan to be nothing more than hidden (and not-so-hidden in the case of Offit) authoritarian fanatics who will literally tear children away from families at gunpoint if that is the only way he can make an entire population act in accordance with his will and belief.

After all, when logic and reason either failure or are on the side of your opponent the only thing you have left to do is to pull out the guns – literally.

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Offit begins his article by citing his typical spiel – hyperventilating over measles cases in a foreign country. Offit blames the anti-vaccine movement for causing this spike in measles cases. This is typical not just of Offit but his fellow quacks who constantly whine in Western media about the anti-vaccine movement causing outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. Of course, these outbreaks are often actually only one case and many of them in fully vaccinated populations. But Offit didn’t let science get in his way during the course of his article so there’s no point in debating him on that issue.

Needless to say, Paul Offit’s poster child for the German vaccine tragedy is not a child at all, but a 37-year-old woman. Likewise, Offit doesn’t mention the fact that allegedly vaccine-preventable diseases are going up in the most heavily vaccinated countries in the world due to lower living standards. It is a documented fact that lower living standards causes an increase of disease and likewise that the United States and Germany have steadily seen a decline in living standards.

Offit has received so much money from Big Pharma it is perhaps difficult for him to conceive of the fact that others may not have the same quality of life as he does. Nevertheless, Offit also isn’t one to let ethics or morality get in his way since not only does he promote authoritarianism, he consistently fails to mention in any of his heavy-handed propaganda pieces that he is set to score big-time if the RotaTeq vaccine – which he invented – is forced upon every child in the country.

It’s already recommended for universal use in infants by the CDC. So while Offit may not be a man you trust with your daughter we have to give him credit for being one hell of a businessman.

Offit continues by promoting a number of other countries that are suffering from anti-vax induced measles epidemics. France, Italy, Poland, Romania, Switzerland and Ukraine are all on the list. Of course the living standards in all these countries are going down steadily, particularly in war-torn Ukraine. But Offit wouldn’t dare acknowledge that lower living standards, population disruption, and war could be the cause of increased disease. No, it’s anti-vaxxers handing out anti-vax flyers on the front lines of a proxy war between Russia and the United States that are responsible for Ukraine’s “crisis.”

But it isn’t Offit’s brow-beating that is the worst part of his article – he quickly moves to discuss the role of government enforcing allegedly free people to inject themselves with substances they do not wish to be injected with.

Offit cites a German policy that requires kindergartens to report children who aren’t vaccinated and a German health ministry decision to fine parents as much as $2500 Euros if they do not vaccinate their children.

It’s ironic that Offit would be using Germany as an example of the direction in which he would like to see western society go in 2017. After all, only 80 years ago Germany had a very negative experience with Offit’s kind. One would think they would be loathe to march down that road again but unfortunately history does repeat itself.

Offit soon turns his sights to the United States where he attempts to show historical precedent for forced vaccination. He cites an early 1900s Massachusetts case that saw a Supreme Court decision upholding the right to forcibly vaccinate a Lutheran minister. He cites another case in 1922 which ruled something similar. Clearly, forcibly vaccinating an adult or a child is a violation of an individual’s rights. If one does not have the right to make decisions as to what goes into their bodies – what rights do they have?

As important as it is, the Supreme Court is not the ultimate arbiter of human and individual rights. After all, one need only revisit the relationship of the Supreme Court and black America to see that this is the case.

After once determining that blacks were not even human beings the Court’s subsequent rulings began according to Lawrence Goldstone, author of Inherently Unequal, “a period of du jour racial discrimination that would last almost a century and was virtually as odious as slavery itself.”

Obviously, had Paul Offit been alive in the 1800s he would have been telling Dredd Scott to go back to picking cotton or perhaps he would have said nothing at all since humans often do not talk to animals.

In 2017 we find the Court’s perspective odious and even alien, but the Paul Offits of the time were leading the pack and having their say. Such simple historical facts as these should serve to remind us of why the Paul Offits of today should never be given any real authority or public responsibility.

Offit then turns to a more recent case that occurred between October 1990 and June 1991. He recounts the story as follows:

Two fundamentalist Christian churches—Faith Tabernacle Congregation and First Century Gospel Church—were at the center of the outbreak. Both were faith-healing groups, refusing vaccination as well as medical care. When their children became ill, these parents prayed instead of taking them to the hospital to receive intravenous fluids for dehydration or oxygen for pneumonia. “If I go to God and ask him to heal my body,” said church member Gordon Korn, “I can’t go to a doctor for medicine. You either trust God or you trust man.”

Public-health officials and legislators turned to the courts for help. First, they obtained a court order to examine the churches’ children in their homes, then to admit the children to a hospital for medical care. Finally, they did something that had never been done before or since: They got a court order to vaccinate children against their parents’ will. Children were briefly made wards of the state, vaccinated, then returned to their parents. At the time of the Philadelphia measles outbreak, a religious exemption to vaccination had been the law in Pennsylvania for about a decade. What the parents were doing by refusing to vaccinate their children was perfectly legal.

The church members reached out to the ACLU to help them protect their civil rights but as is typical of the ACLU they declined to take the case.

What is hard to believe, however, is that Offit would use this situation as an example of the positive. What about it does Offit think is so wonderful. Was it the fact that government stepped in and violated the 4th amendment? Was it the fact that allegedly free individuals had their personal rights and their parental rights violated and that children were vaccinated against their will. Perhaps it was the thought of yanking children from a loving home that makes Offit feel so warm and tingly inside. Personally, I don’t think rational people would find the medical equivalent of Waco as anything other than a travesty of justice and a frightening reminder of what life in an authoritarian police state looks like.

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Perhaps it was the fact that it was a religious organization that was targeted that makes Offit write with such glee. After all, anyone who reads Offit’s work knows that he lives in a world that is full of scary Christians who believe that vaccines are demons and who want to force the world to die of the mumps for Jesus. But what is Paul Offit if not an extremist and a religious fanatic? His facts don’t add up and he can’t use logic or reason – at least not to the point where he could convince his opponents. So what does he do? He wants to pass laws to enforce his beliefs and the rights of those who disagree with him be damned.

Offit is the medical equivalent of a jihadist who wants to enforce the hijab by law. Indeed, when a Muslim Brotherhood member once approached the President of Egypt with a demand to pass just such a law, President Nasser laughed him off of the stage. This is the treatment Offit should receive. Unfortunately, however, as Egypt learned, freedoms are constantly under attack and religious extremists, mentally ill and fringe as they may be, are not simply funny distractions. If given the opportunity, they can cause great damage to society and a country’s way of life.

There does come a time when extremists can no longer be laughed at – it must be dealt with in order to prevent them from imposing their will on rational people. Offit has already made it clear that he is an enemy of free choice and individual civil rights.

Perhaps Paul Offit should be less concerned with what happens parents force the government’s hand on vaccines – and more concerned with what happens when the government and people like him force parents’ hands on vaccines.