Explore this week’s op-eds from Dr. Gold:
BUY IT NOW: ‘Selective Persecution: The Legalization of American Fascism’ — by Dr. Simone Gold, foreword by Dennis Prager
Parents Weigh In As Florida Aims to Drop Four Vaccines
Florida’s top health official has cleared the way for four vaccines to no longer be required for kids entering public school — hepatitis B, chickenpox, Hib, and the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV). Specifically, the Florida Department of Health is proposing to drop hepatitis B, chickenpox, Haemophilus influenzae type B, and pneumococcal conjugate vaccines from the state’s list of mandatory shots for public school students.
State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, an alumnus of America’s Frontline Doctors, signed off on the change on August 20. The proposed rule still needs to clear a 21-day public comment period before it’s finalized.
Current figures show roughly 4% of public school students in Lee and Collier counties already hold religious or medical exemptions from vaccination, and the CDC has found nonmedical exemption rates climbing in most states it tracks.
Notably, the four vaccines at the center of the original dispute were never required under Florida law to begin with, but were only mandated through Department of Health policy.
Parents are split on Florida’s move. The media, predictably, is not. Nearly every mainstream outlet covering the story has found a way to invoke “measles outbreaks” to stoke fear.
But Florida isn’t touching the MMR vaccine. The four vaccines being dropped — hepatitis B, chickenpox, Hib, and PCV — aren’t tied to any outbreak. Take hepatitis B: kids don’t need this vaccine to safely attend school in the first place. It spreads through unsafe drug use, unsafe sex, childbirth, or contact with bodily fluids, not through sitting next to a classmate. Pregnant mothers are already tested for it, and even in the very unlikely case a child does contract it, there’s no realistic path for it to spread at school. There’s no justification for threatening a child’s education over a vaccine that addresses a risk school simply doesn’t present.
So this was never really about “safety” or “public health.” That’s the cover story. This is about informed consent.
Plenty of parents backing this change aren’t anti-vaccine at all. They plan to vaccinate their own kids. Their objection is to who gets to make that call. They believe the decision belongs to parents and their pediatricians, made freely and with full information. It should not be handed down by the state as a condition of school enrollment.
Rachel Grunewald, a mother of two who supports the change, put it this way: “I think that some vaccines are necessary. But if we can try not to give our children vaccines to go to school or have that option to not [vaccinate our children], I think that would be great.”
The people pushing back aren’t actually worried about safety. That’s just the excuse they reach for. What they really want is for the government to decide what’s best for other people’s children. And that runs counter to everything America stands for.
After Years of Waiting, COVID Vaccine Victims May Finally Get Help
The Department of Health and Human Services has agreed to create something that has been missing throughout the entire COVID vaccine rollout: an official injury table spelling out which harms the government will presume were caused by COVID-19 countermeasures.
An injury table lists specific conditions and the time periods in which they must appear after a covered countermeasure. If a listed injury occurs within the specified window, the government presumes causation rather than forcing the claimant to prove it from scratch.
Without a table, claimants must establish causation on their own. That can be expensive, complicated, and extremely difficult.
Until now, anyone injured by a COVID vaccine has had only one federal compensation program available: the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP). Lawyers and advocates have called it a black hole, and the mechanics help explain why.
There is no dedicated trust fund. Payments depend on money appropriated by Congress from the general Treasury. There is no court and no hearing. Claimants submit forms and medical records to the HRSA, which decides the case administratively, behind closed doors.
A lawyer is not required, though claimants may use one. The filing deadline is just one year, compared with three years under the federal vaccine injury program. Compensation is generally limited to unreimbursed medical expenses and lost income, with little or nothing available for pain and suffering. Appeal options are extremely limited.
COVID-19 vaccines were never added to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), the no-fault system Congress created in 1986 to handle vaccine injury claims. Instead, COVID claims were routed through CICP, an emergency program designed for public-health crises rather than as a conventional injury-compensation system.
The numbers show how difficult it has been to obtain compensation. Of more than 14,000 COVID-related claims filed with CICP, only about 60 have resulted in payment — a success rate of less than 1%.
For now, the table remains a proposal, not a final policy. But after years in which fewer than 1% of COVID-related CICP claims have resulted in payment, it represents the first concrete move toward a system in which at least some injuries could be presumed rather than forcing every claimant to prove causation from scratch.
And a federal court has now given HHS six months to show that it intends to follow through.
This sounds like good news, and in a way, it is. Americans whose lives were upended by these experimental shots may finally get some compensation through the CICP.
But it’s not cause for celebration. Look at what the CICP actually is.
The program exists for one purpose: to shield Big Pharma from liability for the harm its vaccines cause. That’s the entire logic behind both the CICP and its sister program, the VICP. One protects vaccine makers during public health emergencies. The other protects them on childhood vaccines. It’s the same function.
No other industry gets this deal. Every other company that sells a product has to answer for it. They set aside money for lawsuits because they know that’s the cost of doing business. Not vaccine makers. People are forced to take these shots, but the companies that make them are never forced to stand behind them. That job falls to the government instead, and the results have been exactly as disastrous as you’d expect.
Only now, six years after the shot was unleashed on the world, is HHS getting around to building an injury table. It won’t even arrive until November. If a Democrat were in the White House, there would be no table at all.
Compensation will help. It might ease someone’s disability, make daily life a little more manageable. But it isn’t justice. Millions of people were harmed by a shot they were forced to take and told was safe. Someone should have to pay for that. And it shouldn’t be their own tax dollars, handed back to them as if the government were doing them a favor.
Daily Dose: ‘The Great Health Insurance Mistake Part 1’ with Dr. Peterson Pierre
