Mandatory vaccination laws began shortly after Edward Jenner began inoculating people with cow pox pus in 1796 to prevent smallpox. Those mandates gave birth to the first pharmaceutical resistance movement in 1809.  Throughout the 19th century the number of vaccines and the frequency that they were given was limited and grew slowly through the end of the 20th century.

National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act 

Prior to 1988, Americans were able to sue for both drug and vaccine injuries as part of the tort law system. And drug companies lost cases, costing them millions of dollars. They threatened to stop producing vaccines to avoid paying settlements to severely injured children, including a subset with autism.  In 1986, the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) removed product liability for vaccine manufacturers and physicians under the guise of protecting the supply of vaccines, and offering the injured a no-fault, generous compensation program. The result has been an explosion of new vaccines, and ever stricter mandates, guaranteeing product sales and profits for Big Pharma, with no downside.

Before the passage of NCVIA, American children received 23 doses of 7 vaccines before age 18, with 13 doses given in the first year of life.  Today, the CDC pediatric vaccine schedule lists 76 doses of 17 separate vaccines, with a whopping 42 doses during the first year of life. This does not include vaccines given during pregnancy. The US vaccine market grew from an annual $100 million in sales in the 1980s to an estimated $50 billion in 2021.

The NCVIA robbed Plaintiffs, (a majority parents of vaccine-injured children), of the right to go to court, and with that the right to discovery and subpoena which are essential tools in a product liability suit. In its place, parents were promised a quick and generous program called the “vaccine court.” A government administered program that puts the fox in charge of the chicken coop.

The resistance begins: Autism Parents

Following the 1986 NCVIA, the autism rate began to climb. The rate had been in 1 in 10,000 for decades, and suddenly was 1 in 1000, 1 in 500, 1 in 288, with no end in sight. Diagnostic substitution and changes in diagnostic criteria alone could not logically explain the exponential increase. Parents watched in horror as their children lost developmental skills and language immediately following vaccination and were subsequently diagnosed with autism.  Orthodox medicine reflexively rejected any possibility that vaccines could be causal. Shunned and gaslit by medicine, parents began to organize advocacy groups, including many still active today: Age of Autism, National Autism Association, Talk About Curing Autism, Autism One as well as many local groups.  Courageous physicians began the Defeat Autism Now movement to address the medical issues associated with autism.

Included in the growing schedule was a Hepatis B injection given to newborns in the hospital nursery. Hep B included a large dose of mercury in the preservative called Thimerosal. Parent activists began to question the mercury in vaccines and pushed Congress to require the FDA to tally how much mercury was in each vial. No one had ever added up the micrograms of this potent neurotoxin being injected into babies and children. The calculations showed quantities of mercury far in excess of FDA and EPA limits and created panic in the federal agencies. An internal study was commissioned which revealed that children exposed to mercury had almost 8 times the autism as those who were not. These facts were revealed by documents and emails obtained by parent activists through Freedom of Information requests and leaked documents. 

Parent activists began to suspect that mercury in the vaccines may be responsible and pushed Congress to require the FDA to quantify how much Mercury was in each vial, something they had never done to this point. The calculations created panic in the federal agencies when they realized infants were receiving quantities of mercury far in excess of FDA and EPA limits. An internal study was commissioned which revealed that children exposed to mercury had almost 8 times the autism as those who were not. These facts were revealed by documents and emails obtained by parent activists through Freedom of Information requests and leaked documents. 

In early 2009 the US Court of Federal Claims issued a decision in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding,  a legal device used to lump together more than 5000 cases claiming autism as a vaccine injury.  An agreement was reached to look at three cases to test different theories of autism causation. If the test case was determined to have caused autism, then that would apply to the others in the  proceeding making the same claim. Just before the final de, one of the test cases, Hannah Poling, was dropped from the proceeding and awarded a $20 million settlement, but the government declared her case would not apply to any others. Two generations of American children were thrown under the bus.

Mass resistance to the war on exemptions

The focus moved away from autism and the courts in 2015 with California’s Senate Bill SB 277, a bill that repealed parents’ rights to exemptions from school vaccine mandates for religious or “philosophical” reasons,  rights parents had in every state except West Virginia and Mississippi. The stakes were high: get your child completely vaccinated according to the state mandated schedule or sacrifice your child’s right to attend school. SB 277 was the first of dozens of similar state bills, almost all introduced by Democrats. SB 277 was passed after a protracted battle involving tens of thousands of parents and allies. Similar bills were passed after raucous fights in Maine in 2018, New York in 2019, and Connecticut in 2021. All the states that passed repeals had Democratic control of both legislative houses and governor.

Prior to the Democrats campaign to eliminate religious and secular exemptions, the majority of activists in the movement were parents of vaccine-injured children. But other parents had listened to the activists, and used parental choice laws in their states to reject the one-size-fits-all approach of public health to tailor individual schedules for their children.  The result was the development of well-organized, grassroots vaccine-rights advocacy groups in every state. These groups began by fighting to keep exemption rights, but also fought HPV vaccine mandates, and became the foundation for resistance of state and federal COVID vaccine mandates, school closures, passports, lockdowns and masking efforts.

While these legislative battles were raging a whole new media ecosystem of podcasters, documentary producers, online journals, and news outlets emerged that managed to get around pervasive censorship by Big Tech and legacy media. The largest of these producers, such as Del Bigtree’s High Wire, get millions of views per weekly episode, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s online newspaper The Defender has over one million subscribers.

In the thick of the Democrats’ effort to repeal exemptions, the film Vaxxed was released in 2016 with an explosion of controversy, including expulsion from the Tribeca Film Festival after it was originally selected for screening. Vaxxed tells the story of a CDC whistleblower who had documents showing that the CDC covered up evidence that the MMR vaccine was associated with significant increases in autism in African-American toddlers, depending on the age the shot was given. Vaxxed could not find a distributor, so a bus tour was organized to promote private screenings across the US hosted by hundreds of grassroots groups. 

Resistance becomes partisan

Prior to the Democrats effort to repeal exemption rights, vaccine issues had no obvious partisan slant. Vaccine rights had a few friends on both sides of the aisle, and many enemies from both parties. By the time COVID hit in early 2020 Republicans had emerged as more sympathetic to vaccination rights and expressed far more skepticism to the draconian responses to COVID proposed by the federal government and some governors even as Republican President Donald Trump launched Operation Warp Speed to develop COVID vaccines.

That partisan divide has intensified under COVID. In the recent midterm election, we could find no Democratic candidates for US Senate who would criticize any aspect of the federal governments’, or states’, responses to COVID, whereas multiple criticisms were offered by almost all GOP candidates with notably aggressive leadership from Senators Rand Paul and Ron Johnson on confronting Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, and challenging the orthodox line on COVID.

Polling data now shows a clear difference between Republicans and Democrats over vaccine rights. A CNN poll found that 85% of Democrats supported the federal effort to require private employers to mandate the COVID shot whereas 70% of Republicans opposed. The same poll found that 78% of Democrats compared to 26% of Republicans found vaccine passports acceptable.

COVID opens the flood gates

Before COVID the vaccine injury and rights movement in the US was dominated by parents of injured children, and parents seeking to avoid vaccine injury. COVID expanded the number to include injured adults. It opened the eyes of loved ones,who bcame skeptical of pointless and intrusive COVID policies implemented by many governments and employers alike.

An unprecedented number of people have been injured by the COVID shot. According to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) 1.4 million injuries including 32,370 COVID related deaths have been reported so far, exceeding all deaths for all other vaccines reported since VAERS was created in 1988. Similarly, data from the V-Safe program recently obtained by court order showed significant vaccine-related injuries. V-safe is a smartphone-based program created by the CDC specifically for people who received COVID vaccines. Out of the approximately 10 million V-safe users, 782,913 people, or more than 7.7%,  had a health event requiring medical attention, emergency room intervention, and/or hospitalization.

Along with the growth of the recommended vaccine schedule, we have seen a marked decline in confidence in the medical and drug industries in the US. In 1975 80% of Americans had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the “medical system.” This dropped to 38% by 2022 according to Gallup. Trust in the pharmaceutical industry is even lower. In 2019 Americans had the lowest overall view of the pharmaceutical industry among all industries, with only 28% of the public holding a positive view compared to 58% with a negative view.

A recent study in the journal Vaccine reported a 23.8% drop in public confidence in vaccines between 2020 and 2022. The ultimate statement of confidence in the COVID shot maybe the fact that despite the complete dominance of public life and the media by fewer than 7% of American children under the age of five have received a single dose.

America is moving steadily toward greater skepticism about the pharmaceutical industry and their products. People’s Pharma Movement mission is to give these voters and others real electoral options on fundamental issues of medical freedom.