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Letter to Neil Pedersen

Posted on May 18, 2011 by Staff

Editor’s note: The following is a letter to Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Superintendent Neil Pedersen regarding the district’s immunization contest.

I read with great interest your blog entry announcing a contest to reward adolescent students with the chance to get iPods or a laptop for getting vaccinated. I applaud the underlying intent, but the contest raises serious policy concerns:

1. The contest discriminates against children who cannot participate due to religious and medical exemptions to immunizations.

2. It erroneously places the incentive to vaccinate on children, when that decision is entirely up to parents.

3. It amounts to state endorsement of one choice from among two or more legitimate options for parents.

4. It amounts to state endorsement of private industry by encouraging the only choice from among two or more choices that supports pharmaceutical profits.

Since vaccines carry a risk of permanent injury and death – the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has paid out more than $2 billion to vaccine victims and their families to date – student vaccination decisions are serious ones that should remain solely in the hands of parents.

Did you know that the U.S. is the most highly vaccinated nation in the world, yet we are 46th in infant mortality? Or that Poul Thorsen, the researcher the CDC relied on for studies used to refute a vaccine-autism connection, was just indicted for 13 counts of fraud with the CDC and nine counts of money laundering? Or that former senior pharmaceutical scientist Helen Ratajczak recently reported that documented causes of autism include vaccination? Or that 95 percent of infectious disease mortality decline in the 1900s preceded vaccines? Or that polio increased substantially after the first mandatory polio vaccine, and that statistics were deliberately manipulated by the Public Health Service to give the opposite impression? With the utmost respect, the school district should not enter this politically sensitive and complex arena. By law, vaccination decisions and enforcement are up to parents and the health department, respectively; the best school policy is to leave them there exclusively.

We are all deeply saddened by the death of the Harrisons’ daughter from meningococcal disease, but the school district might just as well protest adolescent vaccines in recognition of the 89 girls who have died from the Gardasil vaccine. For all of these reasons, this contest is bad policy and should be canceled immediately.

Please contact me at your earliest convenience with your decision on this matter.

Alan G. Phillips, Esq.
Chapel Hill

1 thought on “Letter to Neil Pedersen”

  1. Ken Reibel says:
    May 18, 2011 at 7:28 pm

    Mr. Phillips is repeating anti-vaccine talking points with little or no bases in facts. There is no credible evidence that Gardasil is responsible for one death, let alone 89. Poul Thorsen is not the CDC’s go-to guy for vaccine research. Disease mortality is not the same as disease incidence.

    And on and on.

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