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Parents’ Right to What?

The Immunization Partnership (TIP) is at it again…

The above linked article is written by Sara Farmer, a mom who lost her precious baby. We want to reach out and cry with her because so many of our own have died as well. So many live with lifelong vaccine injury. It hurts, and at times makes any parent doubt that they made all the best decisions. But in the end, we all make the best decisions we can with the information we have at the time. It is an instinct of survival. Some information, however, is being hidden, and our children and loved ones are getting hurt.

Sara Farmer, we grieve with you. We hope your heart mends in beautiful ways. We all want something better for our precious children. I hope someday, we can stand together.

But for now…

TIP, the driving force behind most of the legislation limiting vaccine freedoms in Texas, has decided to tell the public that parents have the “right to know” at each public school campus, how many children are not 100% up to date with the current vaccine schedule. They tried to pull this stunt in the 2015 legislative session and parents across the state made sure their legislators knew why that goal is wrong on so many levels. TIP is pushing this again, and hard.

At the TIP Stakeholders meeting this spring (which I personally attended and witnessed), this bill was brought to the attention of the medical professionals there, who were led to believe that our reasoning for stopping this “important” piece of legislation was “because of, well… bullying.” The doctors, who were getting Continuing Education Units just for attending this meeting, accepted this and perhaps even thought, “A little bullying on these parents to vaccinate their kids might not be a bad idea.”

But parents, by law, do NOT have the right to know if the kids next to theirs have AIDS, Hepatitis B, mono, strep, or any other disease that they are ACTUALLY capable of spreading. That information is kept private to protect the identities of those children. And rightly so.

Why then, should parents have the right to know if their child sits next to a completely healthy child who may or may not be up to date with the the bloated CDC schedule for vaccinations? These children are being presumed diseased, but they cannot spread diseases they do not have.

Most would assume that “HIPAA” should protect this information. It makes sense because it is designed to protect our medical information. However, the correct answer in this situation is FERPA, usually. There is a fine line between the two.

HIPAA mostly applies when a school brings in outside medical staff for a specific reason and they can bill providers. HIPAA is not normally the act required for public schools to follow.

FERPA is the federally-funded, public-school variation of HIPAA that protects your educational and personal information. The only way you can have your educational data shared (which includes any medical information the school knows about) is to give consent.

You not only have to give consent to have your information released, you have to KNOW you are giving it. Informed consent is the only way we can be protected. And if the child who may have been born with HIV is protected under HIPAA and/or FERPA, then, by equal protection under the law, so shall my child… even at the campus level.

TIP and its supporters will try to argue that this bill won’t violate privacy because no personal identifiers would be involved. Tell that to the child who has AIDS or Hep B on that campus… “No one will know it’s you but everyone will know it’s someone.” I know many parents would fret, likely unnecessarily, and start to fear about the possibility of that one child sitting near their own. To protect their child, they may even start to take measures. Even worse, that child will have to survive in fight or flight mode when it comes to his or her security. Ignorance and agenda can turn a campus into a war zone for those whose privacy is supposed to be protected by law and for good reason!! Good grief, I was in public school growing up. One day, a kid ate a booger unaware that he had an audience. He was known as “booger boy” from that day on and beyond high school. Imagine what could be done to a child, or their family, by a local community or individual that wrongly:

  1. believes the unvaccinated are spreading disease
  2. believes the diseases kill masses in our advanced society of clean water, sanitation, and living environment
  3. believes that vaccination always leads to immunization
  4. believes that the vaccinated couldn’t possibly be silent carriers of diseases long after their shots (see: asymptomatic carrier)
  5. believes that public school is the biggest risk for an immunocompromised child when the vast majority of adults, who make up 60% of the total population, is under vaccinated according to the CDC

I meet people that actually believe the things above on a daily basis. And I hold The Immunization Partnership, the CDC, the media and the medical community for serving up and blindly consuming these half truths.

You know what parents DO actually have the right to know? They have the right to know what is in those shots. They have the right to know that a chief CDC scientist has confessed to massive fraud in its research and public education on the MMR vaccine. Parents have the right to know that they legally do have the choice not to vaccinate.

If our legislators buy into to the “Parents’ Right To Know” rhetoric that The Immunization Partnership pushes, they will be creating completely conflicting laws in direct violation to both HIPAA and FERPA. The reason those acts were created would be completely pointless.

If a parent’s right to know is a fundamental principle, then we also ask these questions: Do parents also have a right to be fully informed about their rights and be free of any consequence for asserting those rights? Do they have the right to know vaccine ingredients? How about vaccine risks? And vaccine-related deaths and injuries?

Texans For Vaccine Choice calls upon all state legislators to consider the consequences and long-term ramifications of this type of legislation. Campus level reporting of exemptions has the real possibility of infringing on the rights and privacy of innocent, healthy children who deserve to attend school without fear.

1 thought on “Parents’ Right to What?”

  1. Pingback: How Austin mom Jinny Suh is taking on anti-vaxxers, President Trump and RFK Jr. in defense of inoculation. | First Reading

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