Dear New Jersey Lawmakers,
I am writing as your constituent with concerns about current trends in New Jersey legislation. Since the 2020 legislative session kicked off on January 14, a record number of vaccine bills have been introduced. Of the nearly dozen bills introduced to date, only two seek to protect citizens’ rights; the remaining nine restrict citizens’ rights. The most egregious, A969/S902, is highly discriminatory legislation that would:
- Abolish the state’s religious exemption.
- Create a burdensome bureaucratic process for medically frail individuals to obtain medical exemptions.
- Remove decision-making authority from patients’ doctors and give it to state officials who have no history of caring for those patients.
- Allow children who are deemed “non-compliant” by the state to attend private schools, with no such exceptions made for lower-income families and other students in public schools whose taxpayer dollars support those schools.
As your constituent and a concerned taxpayer, the flurry of legislation is extremely troubling. At a World Health Organization (WHO) summit in December 2019, some of the world’s foremost authorities on vaccines revealed they have serious concerns over their safety and efficacy. The WHO experts acknowledged that post-marketing surveillance systems are largely inadequate for detecting harms from vaccination. Additionally, they acknowledged that scientists have numerous unanswered questions about aluminum adjuvants, which are used in the majority of childhood vaccines (except for Rotavirus and those containing live viruses).
With such gaping holes in vaccine safety, lawmakers cannot continue to ignore serious scientific concerns and expand vaccine mandates — particularly when vaccination rates in New Jersey surpass herd immunity targets and the state already has emergency provisions in place to address infectious illness outbreaks.
Please protect the children of New Jersey by placing a moratorium on additional vaccine mandates until crucial safety and efficacy issues raised by WHO doctors and scientists — highlights of which follow — can be properly addressed. Contrary to what many New Jersey lawmakers proclaim, the science is far from settled.
- “You can’t repurpose the same old science to make it sound better if you don’t have the science that’s relevant to the new problems. So we need much more investment in safety science.” -Dr. Heidi Larson, Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project
- “We cannot overemphasize the fact that we really don’t have very good safety monitoring systems in many countries, and this adds to the miscommunications and the misapprehensions because we’re not able to give clear-cut answers when people ask questions about the deaths that have occurred due to a particular vaccine.” – Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, M.D., Chief Scientist, WHO, Pediatrician
- “Where at six weeks, 10 weeks, 14 weeks, a child is being given different antigens from different companies, and these vaccines have different adjuvants, different preservatives, and so on … Is there a possibility of these adjuvants, preservatives, are cross-reactive amongst themselves? Has there ever been a study on the possibilities of cross-reactions?” – Dr. Bassey Okposen, Program Manager, National Emergency Routine Immunization Coordination Centre
- “In our clinical trials, we are actually using relatively small sample sizes, and when we do that we’re at risk of tyranny of small numbers … So I think one of the things that we really need to invest in are kind of better biomarkers, better mechanistic understanding of how these things work so we can better understand adverse events as they come up.” – Dr. David Kaslow, M.D., V.P., Essential Medicines, Drug Development Program PATH Center for Vaccine Innovation and Access
- “Adjuvants multiply the immunogenicity of the antigens that they are added to, and that is their intention … it is not unexpected if they multiply the incidence of adverse reactions that are associated with the antigen, but may not have been detected through lack of statistical power in the original studies.” – Dr. Stephen Evans, Professor of Pharmacoepidemiology
The WHO comments are stunning, with multiple physicians and scientists openly admitting that there are numerous unanswered questions about the 69 doses of 16 vaccines our children are required to receive starting on day one of life. As such, it would be prudent for lawmakers to halt all efforts to strengthen mandates that restrict choice.
Please oppose S902/A969 (eliminates religious exemptions except for willing, private institutions), S903 (legislates scrutiny of religious beliefs), A1980 (revision of access and reporting for immunization), A1603 (adds a mandate for the HPV vaccine mandate for grades 6 – 12) and ask your peers to do the same.