The New York Times recently ran an article about efforts to pass medical freedom legislation in states across the nation. The article mischaracterized not only what health freedom advocates like myself seek, but also portrayed medical freedom as unpopular with the electorate. The article, and the fake polls it cited, was one of the reasons that my organization, Health Freedom Defense Fund, and Brownstone Institute collaborated to commission our own poll – an honest, objective survey which revealed staggering supermajority support for medical freedom, informed consent, transparency, and accountability.
On February 15, the New York Times published an article that was filled with misrepresentations. The article portrays those asking for legislative changes to enshrine individual control over personal health choices as dangerous, and politically unsupported by the public. Unfortunately, the article relied on off-question polling, third-party insults (activists are “drunk with power”), and a stunning lack of context to drive these points home.
The model medical freedom legislation we are sharing applies to all mandates and coercive medical care for all people, not just vaccine mandates for children. It is stunning that the article does not mention Covid-19 excesses and abuses at all. Only five years ago, the American public was facing unprecedented employer mandates for workers, soldiers, teachers, and college students to either take the mRNA vaccine or be fired or expelled. This was on the heels of a year of mask mandates, stay-at-home orders, capricious school closures, and online censorship of dissenting opinion. How can the Times ignore this important context in terms of the public’s skeptical relationship with both medical and non-pharmaceutical health mandates?
To support the claim that the public is not interested in having full control over our medical choices, the author refers to polling data throughout. In the poll cited as showing the political danger of making any changes to the current vaccine paradigm, the pollsters only asked Congressional swing district voters (not voters overall) about a hypothetical candidate “eliminating recommendations” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The poll did not ask about potential state-level changes that protect each individual’s or guardian’s full control over personal health decisions or that actual mandates do exist in many states. If it had, the results would surely have been different.
Furthermore, the article cites the same poll, in which most swing district voters think the benefits of vaccinating for certain diseases outweigh the risks (though in fact, half of the injections inquired about had less than half of respondents say benefits “definitely” outweigh the risks, a fact the Times omits). The salient question would simply be whether the public thinks a state government has the right to use coercion (threats of lost work, schooling, etc.) to push a pharmaceutical product or medical procedure on anyone, adult or child.
As for the 9% deficit in support for vaccine policy cited in the article from a Jan 19th Wall Street Journal poll, that is a similar deficit that the incumbent party has on healthcare, inflation, tariffs, and the economy overall. More importantly, the Times ignores far more rigorous survey data on the question at hand and the marked deficit of trust in vaccine mandates following the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.
By the end of the Covid-19 debacle, less than 40% of parents and soon-to-be-parents in polling planned to follow the required vaccination schedule and recommended seasonal shots. The rest were either planning to delay, refuse some, or all of the shots, or were undecided. This is a clear signal that mandates were headed for public opposition.
In terms of due diligence, this article also quotes an activist who has publicly stated ties with pharmaceutical companies, a fact that should have been disclosed. A cursory glance at the individual’s organization, and their social media pages, reveal “national partnerships with organizations like Pfizer, GSK, Sanofi, and Novartis.”
Throughout the article the author breathlessly insists that we are one bad piece of legislation from returning to the horror of Victorian-era infant death rates from infectious disease. The article quotes an “expert” who broadly states that “[p]rior to vaccines, one in five kids didn’t make it to their fifth birthday,” clearly crediting vaccines above all for the drop in deaths.
This statement is misleading. In an analysis in Pediatrics in 2000, Guyer and colleagues noted what is obvious to modern epidemiological scholarship: “Nearly 90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality among US children occurred before 1940 when few antibiotics or vaccines were available.” Hence, “vaccination does not account for the impressive declines in mortality seen in the first half of the century.”
It is an uncontroversial observation that other improvements like sanitation, hygiene, clean drinking water, and better living and working conditions played a leading role in those drops in mortality in the first half of the century.
But as stated above, our work is focused on state mandates overall, for any medical treatment, be it curative or preventive. The individual should be able to make a final decision on any medical decision, employing true informed consent, which can only be realized without coercion.
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