Senator Ervin Yen Medical lies
Oklahoma docs lying and crying, lawsuits flying — all to mandate vaccines
January 17, 2017 https://medium.com/@jbhandley
Dr. Eve Switzer, an Oklahoma Pediatrician, and President of the Oklahoma AAP is suing a group of mostly autism parents for defamation
TULSA, Oklahoma —It’s safe to say that Oklahoma has become the momentary epicenter for a national struggle. Once again, a doctor-turned-politician has introduced a forced-vaccination bill. Meanwhile, a pediatrician who heads the American Academy of Pediatrics Oklahoma chapter has sued a Political Action Committee of mostly autism parents, ostensibly for “defamation,” but given the weakness of her case, more likely to shut them up and give the mandatory vaccination law a better chance of passing.
Read on!
It started in Disneyland
In 2015, a media-fueled panic over a small number of non-fatal measles cases emanating from Disneyland turned into a legislative struggle, played out in more than 20 state capitols, pitting pharma-funded state politicians against well-informed and organized parent groups over laws intended to make all CDC recommended vaccinations mandatory in order for children to attend school (health laws are the rights of states, thus the state-level struggle).
Doing away with the Nuremberg Code, basic principles of informed consent, and the constitutionality of medical coercion or denying a healthy child a public education, these lawmakers (typically democrats, often former doctors) introduced bills into their state legislatures, setting off pitched battles across the country.
Of the more than 20 states that endured some level of legislative fighting, only one state lost the battle completely (becoming the third state in the union to have mandatory vaccination laws for children): California.
California State Senator Richard Pan — watch out for water!
I’m not going to belabor the passage of the mandatory legislation in California. It was a ferocious battle, and multiple lawsuits are now trying to overturn the new legislation, which to most laypeople appears to be a fairly blatant violation of the California constitution. If you’d like to be entertained, here’s a video of the California bill sponsor, Senator Richard Pan, telling an audience the most dangerous ingredient in a vaccine is water. Seriously.
While Big Pharma and their legislative minions pointed to the victory in California in 2015 as the start of a nationwide change, two years later proves that most Americans, and the politicians they elect, prefer to leave medical decisions about children in the hands of parents:
since 2015, no new states have added mandatory vaccination laws, meaning 94% of American states support vaccine choice (47 states), while only 6% (WV, MS, CA) have taken away parental rights.
Is Oklahoma the next state to force vaccinate ?
You wouldn’t think Oklahoma would aspire to emulate California on too many fronts, but a single doctor-turned-politician named Dr. Ervin Yen is trying to change all that. Senator Yen is also a Republican, which makes his quest for removing parental rights even more unusual.
Senator Ervin Yen
Yesterday, Oklahoma Channel 9 News reported that, “for a third year in a row, State Senator Ervin Yen has introduced legislation making mandatory for just about every Oklahoma school student to be vaccinated. The Oklahoma City Anesthesiologist wants to eliminate a parent’s ability to check a box and keep their school-attending child from being vaccinated.”
As is often the case, Senator Yen has become masterful at using scare tactics to justify a draconian bill, while also violating simple, basic truths of public health (meaning he is lying).
For example, Senator Yen is using a recent mumps outbreak in Oklahoma to justify the need to force vaccinate every child in Oklahoma, and his warning for what will happen without vaccines is scary and dire (while also being a huge, indefensible lie):
He claims the fact that there were over 300 cases of the mumps in Oklahoma this past year could impact lawmakers this legislative session. “I’d like to get it passed right away before we have a huge outbreak and a lot of people die,” said Yen.
Dr. Yen — an anesthesiologist by training (which has nothing to do with infectious disease or vaccines) — has a history of making incredibly baseless and wild statements about vaccines and public health, and his interview yesterday was no different. A few quick, easily confirmable facts would show that Dr. Yen seems to think falsehoods are the only way to convince Oklahoma’s parents to give up their medical rights. Here’s five quick facts to show you how Dr. Yen is lying:
Fact #1: People don’t die from the mumps. This CDC website says “Death from mumps is exceedingly rare…There have been no mumps related deaths reported in the United States during recent mumps outbreaks.”
Fact #2: Almost everyone who gets mumps during mumps outbreaks has been vaccinated for mumps. The state health department spokesperson in Massachusetts, after a Harvard University mumps outbreak in 2016, said, “the infected students had all been vaccinated against mumps.”
Fact #3: Merck (the maker of the MMR [mumps] vaccine) is being sued by two former scientists who allege the mumps portion of the MMR vaccine is less effective than Merck represents. “According to the lawsuit, Merck began a sham testing program in the late 1990’s to hide the declining efficacy of the vaccine.”
Fact #4: Oklahoma’s department of health issued a report about their own recent mumps outbreak. What did they find? Of 455 cases, only 9% had NOT been vaccinated!
Fact #5: Senator Yen’s primary reason for introducing his bill again is to “maintain herd immunity,” which the data shows the U.S. population has not remotely achieved, because of adults. He claims that the vaccination rate amongst children for the MMR vaccine has declined in Oklahoma:
“We are now at 90 percent,” he said. “If we were still at 95 percent, I would not be doing this.”
Politicians across the country have used this “herd immunity” gambit to try to justify stealing medical rights from parents. They never mention that disease does not distinguish between whether a host is 15 years old or 35, and the truth is that only half of adults in the U.S. are properly vaccinated, so we don’t actually have anything that resembles herd immunity. Are you up to speed on all your shots?
An incredibly dense Senator in my home state of Oregon, Elizabeth Steiner-Hayward (also a doctor), would constantly make the argument that schools need to have “community immunity.” This is a new, made up term that has no basis in fact.
Teachers, administrators, and volunteer parents make up anywhere from 20–40% of the “community” population in a school on any given day, and their vaccination status is completely unknown, but likely to be 50% or less.
Senator Yen and others are precise with numbers about herd immunity that actually mean nothing, this single article from The Hill Newspaper makes all of this abundantly clear, gutting Senator Yen’s entire argument for making vaccinations mandatory:
Of course, if we look back over the decades and note the lack of rampant epidemics in our nation, while remembering that vaccine protection is in perpetual decline, the myth of herd immunity quickly unravels. Our society has never achieved this level of herd immunity, yet not a single major outbreak of disease has occurred.
Noted author and neurosurgeon Russell Blaylock, MD, offers this analysis:
“It was not until relatively recently that it was discovered that most of these vaccines lost their effectiveness 2 to 10 years after being given. What this means is that at least half the population, that is the baby boomers, have had no vaccine-induced immunity against any of these diseases for which they had been vaccinated very early in life. In essence, at least 50% or more of the population was unprotected for decades.”
If only half of America is properly vaccinated, where are the epidemics?
One final point about Dr. Yen and his arguments for forcing vaccines on children. His typical argument is the “herd immunity” lie, but I have lately seen him also use the “protect the immunocompromised” lie, which this article completely debunks, here’s just one quote from the mother of an immunocompromised child:
“If my child were at a stage of treatment in which she was very immunocompromised, she would not be in school. My daughter missed most of fourth grade and a good portion of fifth, not because she was so sick, but because others were sick. Despite a nearly 100% vaccine compliance rate at our school, there were regular outbreaks of shingles, occurring after chicken pox vaccine boosters, influenza and other illnesses. Please note that, even in areas in which vaccine compliance is extremely high, there are still outbreaks of disease that arenot caused by the unvaccinated.”