To:
Re:
From:
Date:
Administrative Law Judge Eric Lipman
[email protected]
Immunization Rules docket 0900-30570
Testimony against the proposed new rule
Nancy Hokkanen
10357 York Lane
Bloomington, MN 55431
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Dear Judge Lipman:
I am unable to testify in person because I must take my son to see his physician.
I cannot support the proposed increase of required vaccines for children as requested by the
Minnesota Department of Health.
MDH representatives take pride in their efforts to protect children from disease. But they define
“safe” as when benefits outweigh risks – contradicting Webster’s dictionary, which defines safe as
without risk. Physicians vow to first do no harm, but how can they know whether some of the
vaccines they administer may be harming more people than they help?
The Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, Vaccine Safety Datalink, and National Vaccine
Injury Compensation list only a small portion of vaccine injury victims – reporting is estimated at a
mere 1 to 10%. MDH’s SONAR claims that the Hepatitis B vaccine is “safe,” though nationally
1,500 injury claims were filed in the NVICP and 228 people were compensated.
MDH cannot definitively state whether the vaccines it requests adding are reasonable and necessary
because they do not have an accurate system for tracking adverse reactions to those vaccines. They
have no contact with local vaccine injury victims. Thus they have no statistical basis for comparing
risks to benefits, using their utilitarian formula.
MDH bases their decisions on safety studies submitted for FDA approval. However usually the
children in those studies are not followed longer than five to fourteen days. Also safety studies screen
out unhealthy children, so when the approved vaccine is released to the full population, the injuries
appear – and vaccines are rarely withdrawn.
Worse, some large-scale safety studies on vaccines have not used normal saline as placebo; instead,
another vaccine is used for comparison. Consequently both study groups show comparable spikes in
ER admissions, hospitalizations, and asthma attacks. For a pneumococcal vaccine test, the control
group of 16,000 kids was given an experimental meningococcal rather than a true placebo.
Because of such research shortcuts and practices bordering on fraud, a growing subpopulation of
children is reacting adversely to vaccines. Parents have been forced to form information sharing
networks, attempting to undo the medical and developmental damage inadvertently caused by public
health agencies’ one-size-fits-all policies.
In 1998-99 my infant son reacted adversely to vaccines and still has health problems. Since his 2002
autism diagnosis I have read daily about vaccine safety issues, and interact with researchers,
physicians, and hundreds of parents of vaccine-injured children. I co-moderate a listserv on
biomedical autism treatments, am a member of the Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota, and write
for the Age of Autism online newspaper.
Society is largely unaware of the in-home health holocaust affecting countless families
internationally. That’s because parents of children suffering vaccine-induced health and behavioral
problems live like prisoners on house arrest. Pain causes the children, many nonverbal, to act out
publicly and privately. Perversely, for treatment most doctors simply prescribe psych meds instead of
providing examinations and palliatives.
Children’s myriad health symptoms may include painful gastrointestinal disorders, immune
dysfunction, psychosis and more; their exams and lab tests have revealed lesions lining the intestinal
mucosa vaccine-strain measles, autoantibodies to myelin basic protein, and toxic levels of mercury
and other metals. A large study to be published this August in the Journal of Investigative Medicine
found that the number of hospitalizations for children with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)
increased 65 percent from 2000 to 2009.
Sadly an abundance of empirical and clinical evidence is dismissed as coincidental, without
examination, by medical trade unions and public health communities whose economic disincentives
and culture of denial contribute to the autism epidemic now affecting 1 child in 50. The VICP’s
Special Masters and Department of Justice attorneys see similar vaccine injuries in court time after
time, yet neither they nor the CDC promote examination of the children for genetic tests, immune
status, vaccine lots used, etcetera.
Injustice is rampant in the NVICP, where 80% of cases filed are tossed out and others take years to
settle. My son’s vaccine injury case was dismissed when a Special Master decided the statute of
limitations began when I told a pediatrician my concern about speech delay. Yet that lone symptom
does not warrant a clinician’s autism diagnosis.
Vaccine injury victims and their families are left to fend for themselves, marginalized into a
persecuted medical minority, insulted with the “anti-vaccine” pejorative. But as vaccine injuries
continue unprevented, vaccination becomes a game of chance – so vaccine injury reports that aren’t
muzzled by corporate media create justified fear among consumers.
No other product purchased in the U.S. can get away with such inadequate consumer protection. In
recent years when Toyota owners experienced crashes due to sudden acceleration, the manufacturer’s
initial response was to blame the victim. However with pressure from the legal system, the
automaker was compelled to recall its cars, examine failed systems, repair the problem, and
compensate victims.
The MDH claims that only their science is valid, yet on closer investigation – via FOIA requests by
parent advocates – the vaccine industry is just as susceptible to corruption as other pharmaceutical
marketing.
• CDC study author Poul Thorsen, who engineered several falsified Thimerosal epidemiology
to dispute the vaccine/autism link, is on the U.S. Office of Inspector General’s Most Wanted
Fugitives list.
• Two former Merck virologists have filed in U.S. District Court claiming they were forced to
falsify mumps vaccine efficacy rates in clinical trials.
• In 2000 the CDC's Dr. Coleen Boyle emailed a colleague suggesting he dilute autism data
(email here).
• That colleague, Dr. Frank DeStefano, authored the recent antigen study that MDH is using to
justify increasing Minnesota children’s vaccine load (critique here).
So why aren’t the MDH and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control investigating why vaccine injuries
occur, or how they can be treated? Perhaps the answer lies in these charts from the health advocacy
group SafeMinds, which show how autism change points coincide with vaccine increases.
The daughter of Minnesota’s former Governor Jesse Ventura suffered an adverse reaction to a
vaccine; that is documented on the Jade Foundation website. There may be others in Minnesota
government, even MDH, whose children reacted adversely to vaccines – but they are not speaking
publicly about it.
The information I have presented is but the briefest of summaries of my years of reading and
interviewing, of the thousands of files on my computer, of the FOIA documentation obtained on
CDC officials by parent advocates, and the scientific research available for those willing to look.
As long as vaccine injury is met with denial by government and medical professionals, the rates will
continue to climb and consumer refusal will continue to grow.
Judge Lipman, you have the rare opportunity to tell public health policymakers at the Minnesota
Department of Health to take a long, honest look at the data upon which they base their decisions and
decide who comes first – their CDC/pharma associates, or all of the citizens of Minnesota.
No child should be written off as collateral damage in the war on disease.
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