Posted 9/10/2015
by Barbara Loe Fisher
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NVIC recently reported that the federal government has directed all
public and private schools to publish vaccination and personal belief
vaccine exemption rates, even though less than 1.7 percent of
kindergarten children have any vaccine exemptions and less than one
percent of children under 36 months old are unvaccinated.
1 2 3
This Centers for Disease Control (CDC) directive comes at a time when
nationwide 94 percent of kindergarten students have gotten multiple
doses of federally recommended vaccines for the past three decades,
4 including five doses of pertussis and two doses of measles containing vaccines.

But
what the CDC is not telling parents, is the rest of the story about the
real health status of school children in America. Perhaps the CDC is
pursuing higher and higher vaccination rates and gutting vaccine
exemptions to try to take attention away from the chronic disease and
disability epidemic sweeping through classrooms that makes it harder and
harder for children to learn and be healthy.
California: CDC’s Role Model
California is serving as the CDC’s role model for how states can go
about shaming schools with less than a 95 percent vaccine coverage rate
and blaming students with non-medical vaccine exemptions for endangering
the public health. After California health officials joined with the
liability free pharmaceutical and medical trade industries this year to
lobby for elimination of the personal belief vaccine exemption (PBE) so
they could segregate partially and unvaccinated children into
homeschools,
5
they created a new website with an interactive map to post the names
and addresses of kindergarten and middle schools; the numbers of
children enrolled; the personal belief exemption (PBE) rate; up to date
(UTD) vaccination rate, and the coverage rates for nine state mandated
vaccines, including DPT, polio, MMR, hepatitis B and varicella zoster
vaccines.
6
Putting Color Stars on Schools
The CDC has created a similar national website dedicated to
incentivizing all states to use electronic medical records and vaccine
tracking systems to publish school vaccination and PBE rates.
7
But health officials in California have gone one step further: they
also “rate” schools from “safest” to “most vulnerable” with the
following color coded rating system:
- GREEN * Safest. 95 to 100 percent of students fully vaccinated.
- YELLOW * Moderately vulnerable. 90 to 95 percent fully vaccinated.
- ORANGE * More vulnerable. 80 to 89 percent fully vaccinated.
- RED * Most vulnerable. Less than 79.9 percent fully vaccinated.
- BLUE * Did Not Report in 2014-2015.
Giving Parents More Relevant School Health Information
If government health officials are determined to violate the medical
privacy of children and post detailed vaccination and PBE rates for
schools, then at the end of the 2015-2016 school year, parents should
have access to much more relevant health information about each school
and the students attending those schools, information like:
- The total number of sick days taken by students due to illness;
- The percentage of students infected with HIV, hepatitis, tuberculosis, syphilis and other transmittable diseases;
- The percentage of chronically ill students on medication for asthma, diabetes, ADHD, epilepsy, anxiety, bipolar disorder and depression;
- The percentage of students with life threatening peanut and other severe allergies;
- The percentage of students with learning disabilities, autism and other conditions requiring special education services; and
- The percentage of fully vaccinated and unvaccinated students who contracted infectious diseases.
The Immune Deficient: More Virus Shedding and Transmission

Parents may also want to know the percentage of children in each school who have
cancer and other
immune compromising diseases.
Immune deficient children and adults, whether or not they have been
vaccinated, are much more vulnerable to becoming infected with both wild
type and vaccine strain viruses. The immune-compromised also are more
likely to shed wild type and vaccine strain viruses for longer periods
of time in their body fluids and transmit viral infections to other
vaccinated and unvaccinated persons.
8
If, in the name of transparency and the public health, government
health officials are going to identify and demonize schools with a
vaccine coverage rate of less than 95 percent and encourage
discrimination against and segregation of students with religious and
conscientious belief vaccine exemptions – especially when almost no
medical condition qualifies for a medical exemption
9 - then parents deserve to know the truth and nothing but the truth about the health of children attending different schools.
How Many Highly Vaccinated Students Are Not Well?
Just exactly how many children attending public and private schools with different vaccine coverage rates
are chronically sick and disabled?
10 11 How many are taking medication for severe allergies, asthma, diabetes, epilepsy, anxiety, bi-polar disorder and depression;
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 or are suffering with learning disabilities, ADHD and autism;
23 24 25 26
or are severely immune compromised and sick with cancer, HIV,
hepatitis, tuberculosis, syphilis and other kinds of immune compromising
diseases, some of them transmissible?
27 28 29 30 31 32 33

These
crippling medical conditions have increased by 10 to 100 percent or
more among school children over the past 30 years at exactly the same
time that public health officials have pounded children with three times
more vaccinations than children used to get. There are long standing
vaccine safety research gaps that the Institute of Medicine identified
20 years ago and as recently as 2013,
34 35 36
including lack of adequate evidence that the government’s childhood
vaccine schedule of 49 doses of 14 vaccines before age six is safe.
37
And there are still no credible scientific studies funded by government
to compare the health of highly vaccinated children with children
receiving fewer or no vaccines.
Full Transparency or Respect for Human Rights?
Full transparency about the health of schools and student populations
would provide parents with a way to identify which schools and school
populations are actually healthier, not simply how many children in a
school have personal belief vaccine exemptions or what color star public
health officials have pinned on them. Of course, a more intelligent and
compassionate operation of our nation’s public health program would
serve the people much better, starting with respect for the human right
to informed consent to medical risk taking and rejection of the politics
of demonization, discrimination and segregation.
38
Protect your right to know and freedom to choose by becoming a vaccine
choice advocate in your community today. Go to NVIC.org and
NVICAdvocacy.org to learn how.
It’s your health. Your Family. Your Choice.