Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Alyssa Black (Chair)]: Hi, welcome. Today is Tuesday, February 3, 01:00, House Healthcare. And we are hearing from advocates today in several realms. And we're going to start off with Mary Holland from the Children's Health Defense. Ms. Holland, would you if anyone has any questions, would you prefer to go through your testimony without interruption? Or would you like questions if they arise during? How would you like to handle that?

[Mary Holland, President & CEO, Children’s Health Defense]: I would prefer to go through the whole presentation and then take questions, but I would love to answer any questions I can. Okay, thank you.

[Rep. Alyssa Black (Chair)]: You. Go ahead and get started.

[Mary Holland, President & CEO, Children’s Health Defense]: Thank you so much. It's really an honor to be here. I was actually here before this committee in 2011, so fifteen years later. And a number of things have changed, obviously, in the interim. And so I do look forward to answering any questions I can. So I am president and CEO of Children's Health Defense. It's an organization that was founded ten years ago by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, to address toxic exposures to children, to expose toxic exposures, to prevent them going forward, put in place safeguards, and to seek redress for anything of the people who had been injured, and in particular to so looking at a range of things, food, air pollution, water pollution, but with a significant focus on medicine and a focus on corruption and regulatory bodies and in that context, a focus on vaccines. And I do want to talk specifically about Vermont. So I was just at a press conference and I'm aware of what I consider and others consider to be five excellent bills, here in Vermont, in the House, that support choice, that support informed consent bodily autonomy. You'll remember that the Hippocratic Oath for medicine is First Do No Harm, and that the Nuremberg Code that was established by American lawyers and doctors at the end of World War II is the consent of the individual is absolutely essential. That was about experimentation, but it's been expanded in every area of medicine. So all of these prohibiting masks for school attendance, requiring reporting of adverse reactions to immunization, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of immunization status, and then a bill that would really enforce health choice across the board. I think those are all very laudable bills that are worthy of consideration. So Kennedy, both at Children's Health Defense and now at Health and Human Services, really focused on the epidemic of chronic oh, I'm sorry, and I wanted to pass around to you. So these are the slides so that you have them. And there's a place for notes if you wanted to take notes while I'm speaking and come back to any questions.

[Rep. Alyssa Black (Chair)]: So

[Mary Holland, President & CEO, Children’s Health Defense]: vaccines address infectious disease. And a law was passed in 1986, really implementing the architecture that we have around vaccine mandates at the state level and recommendations at the federal level. And we can come back to, I believe, the Bill five forty five that really is changing that system. But as much as that law addressed infectious disease, the real health crisis in The United States today is chronic disease. So not only about half of all Americans have some kind of chronic condition, but forty percent of kids have a chronic condition, whether it's asthma, allergies, obesity, autoimmune disease, behavioral disorder. This is Centers for Disease Control data. I don't think this is really controversial. Over seventy five percent seventy seven percent of young adults, 18 year olds, are ineligible for military service, meaning that they don't have the mental health or the physical health to allow them to serve in the military. So obesity, poor physical fitness, mental health challenges. So we have sick kids. I think we have to acknowledge that we have a chronic disease epidemic. And the Make America Healthy Again report that was commissioned by the president last year, about a year ago, starts to address that. So looking at Vermont in particular, apparently seventy one percent of kids get some kind of mental health treatment. This is, from Health Vermont, sixty percent of kids who had a developmental screening by age three. So nothing wrong with screening, nothing wrong with getting mental health treatment. But again, these are significant numbers. We need to be concerned about what is happening to kids. Vermont undoubtedly has better health than most states in The United States, but these are still very concerning numbers. So autism prevalence here in Vermont, two point one percent of children. Autism is a very challenging condition. Two point one percent of kids, the average age of diagnosis, which is probably later than the condition developed at four and onetwo years old. Nine percent of the parents say that there are unmet needs. Asthma prevalence, seven percent. Child obesity rates, eleven percent. Percent of patients at health centers who are children. So as much as Vermont clearly has better children's health than many states in The United States, children's health is a concern for everybody. And from my perspective, from the perspective of children's health defense, it's not a partisan issue. We all want our children to be happy and healthy. I don't think that's a partisan issue. So I know that the Bill five forty five has passed the House. And I know that that is essentially to insulate Vermont from what it considers to be federal to insulate it from federal recommendations around vaccination and what the Centers for Disease Control is doing. And so Vermont, as I understand it, is saying it wants to endorse former CDC policy. It wants to continue the kind of policies that it's had. The reality is that nothing that has happened at the federal level to date changes anything here on the ground in Vermont. I just want to make that really clear. What has happened at the federal level so far is that of the 17 federally recommended vaccines, now only 11 are recommended for universal use. And the other ones have been designated as shared clinical decision making. What does shared clinical decision making mean? It means that it may depend on the individual child. It should be decided between the health care practitioner and the parents or that child whether or not they get it. All vaccines are still available, and all vaccines are still covered by insurance. All vaccines are still covered by the injury compensation program that was set up by the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. So I'm not honestly sure what the problem is that Vermont and 18 other states believe that they're fixing that exists right now. Because, really, federal policies has not changed anything that the states can do in terms of vaccines. But just to give you some idea of how vaccination policy has radically shifted over the last forty years, you need to understand that before Congress passed a liability shield for doctors and health care workers and for the pharmaceutical industry, there were very few vaccines that were recommended to all children. It was the polio vaccine and the diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine. That was pre-nineteen eighty six in the liability shield. After that, you see an explosive rise in federally recommended vaccines that states then mandate, Mesos mumps rubella, rotavirus, flu vaccine, Haemophilus influenzae B, hepatitis B, pneumococcal vaccine, hepatitis A, varicella vaccine, the vaccine schedule exploded over this period of time, concomitant with the increase in chronic disease. Is there an absolute correlation? It needs to be explored, obviously. It has not been adequately explored. So basically, up until 2025, 72 doses of vaccines were being federally recommended before AJT, including an annual flu shot and then many vaccines, including in teenage hood, the meningitis shot. So nobody can dispute that the vaccine schedule has shifted radically over the last forty years. So what are some of the issues that people challenge around vaccines? There's no medical intervention that is without risk. None. That doesn't exist. And vaccines are no exception. And so what we do know is that it is indisputable, and in the 1986 congressional act itself, that vaccines can cause permanent harm and death. And so these are some of the things that are reported, seizures, convulsions, neurological issues. Remember that when vaccines are being recommended or mandated by states to young children. This is the peak time of neurological development. The brain in utero and in the early years is expanding like crazy. And it's precisely during that first two years of life that a lot of these vaccines over 30 are being recommended to children. So what we do see are seizures, neurological issues, autoimmune conditions. And there are real questions here that need to be looked at. Also, have to look at the vaccines. We tend to think, oh, it's just a measles virus, or it's just a mumps virus, and that's all there is in it, or there's a diphtheria antigen. No, that's not all the things that are in vaccines. Aluminum is in most of the vaccines on the childhood schedule. Aluminum is a toxin to all living things, all tissues in the body, including the brain. Borax. Borax is a poison. You can look it up. Sodium borate is in vaccines. Formaldehyde is in vaccines. Simian virus forty was found pervasively in the polio shots. They didn't intend that. Porcine viruses were found in the rotavirus shots. Mercury, up until about the early 2000s, was in many vaccines. It's still in multi dose flu vaccines. Aborted fetal cell lines are used in the manufacture of certain vaccines, including the MMR. Recombinants, so GMO vaccines, is like the human papillomavirus vaccine. So these are things that are just absolutely verifiable. These are things that one can look up pretty easily. So to the issue of where are we spending money as a country, probably where are you spending money as a state, it's all about chronic disease. It's really not about infectious disease. Ninety percent of the $4,900,000,000,000 in The United States goes to chronic and mental health issue. So at a minimum, these chronic health conditions require significant attention. So where does this idea that we all have to be vaccinated come from? It comes from the idea that was observed from natural immunity, the idea of herd immunity. And there's absolutely a phenomenon of herd immunity. In fact, before we had a measles vaccine, pretty much everybody in The United States before age 15 would acquire measles and develop natural immunity going forward. But this term herd immunity has then been applied to vaccine induced immunity without it being entirely accurate. And so this idea of herd immunity gets this idea that we have to use compulsion. We have to coerce people to get vaccines because otherwise there will be free riders and there will be super spreaders and that we all have a duty to get vaccinated for the greater good. And certainly, we saw a lot of that around COVID vaccination. So COVID in particular showed us there are side effects from the vaccination, not only direct side effects, but in New York City, schools were closed for two years. Remote learning certainly doesn't work for all children. In New York City schools, there were forced, invasive nasal testing on children without young children, five year olds without their parents, tremendous pressure to get vaccinated. In Washington, DC, we won a lawsuit against the District of Columbia that was basically allowing children as young as nine to consent to any vaccine without their parents' knowledge. Most private schools compelled COVID shots. Most schools, and I think some in Vermont here, compelled masking when there was really no legitimate science showing that the mask would stop the transmission of this virus. Plexiglass barriers, social shunning, image of child playing the trumpet in a tent. The lengths we went to during COVID were quite extraordinary. And yet, with all of this emphasis on coercion and compulsion, peer pressure, government pressure, the ethic of modern medicine is prior, free, and informed consent. That has been memorialized in so many different places. But particularly, it was 1947, and it was US doctors and US lawyers in Nuremberg after World War II bringing to account Nazi doctors who had done atrocious things. They had perpetrated atrocities on innocent people. And the first item in the code of 10 is informed consent is absolutely essential. And that related to experimentation. But over the years, through the Belmont Report, through the UNASCO Declaration on Human Rights and Bioethics, that has absolutely been expanded to all medicine, whether it's treatment, whether it's prevention. It expansive. And yet, the idea of vaccine mandates fundamentally the idea that it's mandatory, you can't go to school without it, you can't keep your job without it, you can't serve in the military without it that is diametrically opposed to prior free and informed consent. So a big question in a book that I edited addresses, why do we know how do you all know that vaccines are safe? And the official narrative about how we know that vaccines are safe is that there's free licensing clinical trials. Well, there's a problem with those because they never use true inert placebos. Not a single vaccine on the federally recommended childhood schedule has been tested against a true inert placebo. Some of the clinical trials were done with no control. Some were done against older versions of the vaccines, or they were done against the carrier solution just without the antigen, often containing aluminum. So then the second pillar. So there's a problem with the first pillar. How else do we know vaccines are safe? Well, from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System that was created by this 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. Well, the VAERS program for tracking adverse events is a passive reporting system. Doctors, nurses, health care practitioners are not mandated to report adverse events. Anybody can submit a report, and the CDC very rarely does any kind of verification of the reports. Also, during COVID, we saw that records were being removed from the VAERS system. It is a thoroughly inadequate system, as the vaccine manufacturers and the governments recognize. And so they say it's a great system when they want to. They say it's a terrible system when they don't. The third and final way that we should know that vaccines are safe is post licensing studies. So a vaccine comes on the market, and then somebody does a big clinical trial looking at the outcomes of the people who took the shots and the people who didn't. Well, who has the money to study 20,000 people and the people who got vaccinated and the people who don't? Well, it's the pharmaceutical industry. They're obviously a biased party. And so typically, what we see with post licensing studies is they're favorable towards the pharmaceutical industry. We also know that a lot of what gets published in medical journals showing the safety, for instance, of the human papillomavirus vaccine or other vaccines, the COVID shots, they are published in medical journals that also are very dependent on their income from the pharmaceutical industry. So does the FDA test vaccines for safety? You might imagine that our most important oversight body for drugs tests vaccines. There is a Center for Biologic Evaluation Research within the FDA. But no, they do not actually have any independent testing. What the FDA does is they review the data that the drug company submits to them. They do not do any independent testing on vaccines when they come. That may be changing, but that's been the case for decades. So I think this is an important and illustrative list. So on the left, you see the conditions, as I mentioned, one of the important provisions of the 1986 act when they gave liability protection to industry and to the healthcare practitioners was to say, people are going to be injured from this. They acknowledge that people are going to die from this because you can't have one medicine for everybody that's going to work for everybody. That's impossible with the ingredients that are in vaccines. So they created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. And it's paid out over $5,000,000,000 to date. So it works a little bit. It's not a great system. But on the left, you'll see the conditions that have been compensated, Guillain Barre, transverse myelitis, encephalopathy, brain inflammation, seizure disorders, death, brachial neuritis, acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, Bell's palsy, fibromyalgia, anaphylaxis, going down the list. And then if you look at what is on the product inserts for vaccines that are prepared by the drug manufacturer, they go to the FDA. They have to list all of the adverse events that are sent to them at the drug company. It's virtually the same list Guillain Barre, transverse myelitis, encephalopathy, seizure disorder, death, brachial neuritis. So we have reason to believe that some of the conditions that we're seeing that are very severe conditions are related to vaccines because they've been proven by a standard of more likely than not in the vaccine compensation program. And the pharmaceutical industry has acknowledged that those are things that they've submitted. So unfortunately, what we've seen over the last many decades, particularly in states like New York, where I'm from, is this not only the repeal of religious exemption in New York and in certain other states, but we've also seen this narrowing of medical exemptions, this idea that these people are trying to be free riders and the doctors know that it's helpful. And the law in New York is it's actually up to the Doctor's state license. So if a doctor says a child should get a medical exemption, the child should get a medical exemption. Well, no. So this girl is Sarah Doe on the left with her mother. Sarah got medical exemptions from seven physicians. Count them, seven physicians. She lives on Long Island and a medical consultant to her school district, the Oceanside School District on Long Island said, no, these seven letters will not give you a medical exemption. This girl had severe autoimmune conditions, which I can go into if you want. Anyway, we helped her file a lawsuit against the school district, and she won a preliminary injunction that she was entitled to her medical exemptions and to attend school. This child had been out of school for several years and had become extremely depressed and suicidal not being able to attend school. There's been a very significant change in law related to religious exemptions. In September, the Supreme Court issued what's called a granted, vacated, remanded order in Miller v McDonald. Miller v McDonald was a case on behalf of Amish families in New York and in schools who did not want to vaccinate. It is not a part of their religious tradition. They came to The United States hundreds of years ago, and they believe this is a part of their religious tradition. And the case was sent back because the Second Circuit said, nope, there's no right to a religious exemption. It's not a part of parental rights. It's not a part of free exercise of religion. State has declared that. The Supreme Court sent the case back in light of Monmouth v. Taylor. Monmouth v. Taylor was a case that the Supreme Court decided in June 2025, and that's about LGBT curricula in schools. And what the court said in that case is religious practice and parental rights carry into the schools. And when you're looking at infringement of any fundamental right, including, in that case, parental rights of children, you must apply strict scrutiny. Strict scrutiny mean the government has to achieve its objective in the least restrictive means possible. You cannot, with 45 states that have religious exemptions, show that a repeal of the religious exemption, New York in 2019, is the least restrictive means possible. So it's going to be very interesting to see what happens in the Miller v. McDonald case and what is going to happen at the Supreme Court level regarding the constitutionality of the denial of religious exemptions in the country. Mary, sorry. Can you remind us what GVR stands for in that sense? Yes. Granted, vacated, remanded. So that's what happened to the Second Circuit decision in Miller v. So the Supreme Court said to the Second Circuit, you better go back and do your homework in light of Mamouj that says, you have to apply strict scrutiny. You have to come back and tell us that what you're doing to this Amish school and these Amish kids is the least restrictive means possible to control infectious disease. And let's face it, in New York schools, we have faculty who aren't vaccinated. We have staff who aren't vaccinated. We have children who are awaiting their vaccination status when they're first enrolled into school. 18 year olds aren't subject to this. So in New York, we have a hodgepodge hodgepodge making it impossible, frankly, to justify it by strict scrutiny that there is no right to a religious exemption. But we defer to the courts, and we will see what happens. So a little bit more on Mahmoud v. Taylor. This was about parents who objected that their children were first able to opt out of curricula that they found not aligned with their religious traditions. They were allowed to opt out. Then the school said, no, this is too much of a hassle. Everybody has to do this. So they were compelling the kids to take these. And then some parents, sued, in Maryland, and, the court decided, six three, that, no, you can't compel parents to keep their kids in school. And it's not adequate to say that homeschooling is an alternative. It's not equivalent to being in school. I think we figured that out on Brown versus Board a bit. So anyway, the whole schedule has not been tested. Another important lawsuit was brought against the Centers for Disease Control itself, that the whole schedule has never been proven safe and effective. Indeed, the Institute of Medicine, the highest medical authority in the country in 02/2013, has declared that you can't say that they're safe because the whole schedule has never been tested. We also Children's Health Defense is challenging the American Academy of Pediatrics on this issue because the American Academy has been saying for decades, it's been robustly tested. We know it's safe. There's no problem. Even kids who are sick should be able to get the shots. You can give almost an unlimited number of shots at one time. And in fact, in our case against the American Academy, we have two mothers as plaintiffs whose children died by following the three children died, two twins and a single child. They died following the schedule. So are unvaccinated kids healthier? Or are vaccinated kids healthier? I wouldn't be here if vaccination really contained no risks. I have an adult son who was severely vaccine injured. And I have been a part of the community of parents whose children have been vaccine injured for decades now. And those parents have faced not the opportunity to speak to groups like this and have been told, no, you're dreaming. It couldn't possibly have been vaccines. It was fate. But one of the things we know is there is no such thing as a genetic epidemic. And these issues around special education and chronic disease in children are new. We haven't seen them. We didn't have them forty years ago. So this was a book that was done by Robert Kennedy and our chief science officer, Brian Hooker, Vax, Unvax, Let the Science Feet. So this is a meta analysis of all the independent studies that actually have a control group of unvaccinated people, both children and adults. And what we see is that it's vaccinated children who sadly have much higher burden of chronic disease. Among them, asthma, autism, gastrointestinal disorders, but other autoimmune conditions. And there's a lot of new science that's coming on that is we just published a paper literally yesterday from our science team showing the mechanism. Aluminum is toxic. We're showing the mechanism how aluminum containing vaccines passes through the blood brain barrier and harms the brain. So I think we're getting a lot farther on the science behind vaccine injury than we had before. So in that light, I turn to what has happened at Health and Human Services. So at the very beginning, about a month ago, I guess less than a month ago, the CDC announced an unprecedented change. It didn't just ramp up the schedule. It actually said that now just 11 shots are being universally recommended as a federal basis, which creates this liability shield, and that some shots are now going to be for shared clinical decision making, which, in my view, should be the whole schedule. It's between a doctor and an individual. That is what informed consent is. So right now, the seven shots that are shared clinical decision making are respiratory syncytial virus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, meningococcal, rotavirus, COVID and flu. And then the other ones that are unchanged measles, mumps, rubella, polio, diphtheria tetanus, pertussis, moccasin influenza B, pneumococcal, human papillomavirus, and varicella. So there's now been this bifurcation, Federally recommended is 11, and then the rest of them, the other six, are shared clinical decision making. This is a significant step. We've never seen this. I'm not quite sure why so many blue states find this so threatening. I would be very interested to hear because most states do not mandate 17 shots. Most states mandate about nine or 10 at most. They don't there's not a single state that mandates an annual flu shot. There's not a single state that's mandating the COVID shot. So candidly, I don't really understand why states are taking the actions that they are, and I'd be happy to talk about five forty five if people are interested. So the reality of the new policies at CDC is that all the vaccines remain fully available. Insurance is still covering them. The injury compensation program is still covering them. And that now parents have a little bit more room to make individualized decisions. I don't think we're going to have quite the same war around medical exemptions in New York, given a little bit more flexibility with shared clinical decision making. They are still covered by the injury compensation program. There's some question what would happen longer term about liability protection for the vaccine manufacturers and health care workers. But that's not an issue based on current policy. One of the things that was striking that we learned last year was that in this 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act that so completely changed the landscape around vaccine policy in the country, that the law itself required the creation of a task force for safer childhood vaccines because there was no liability in courts, essentially. And so we brought a lawsuit to create that task force. For forty years, no task force had been, had never reported to Congress. It was supposed to be reporting to Congress every two years. So we're very proud of that, and we look forward to the reports about how they are making vaccines safer, because there's never been acknowledgment to Congress about how they did that. I know that one of the bills here, 61, is really to say anything that interferes with bodily autonomy and discriminates against people who are not in compliance with a violation of bodily autonomy should not be the case, that there should be full choice. And there are very strong arguments, especially based on the lack of science behind the vaccine program, why we really should have choice, why there should be full, unfettered choice. And you may know that Idaho is the first state that has passed a true health freedom bill, basically saying that children do not need that nobody can be deprived of schooling or be deprived of a job based on their vaccination status or any other they can't be mandated to wear a mask and so forth, any other medical intervention. So basic ideas here there really should be prior free and informed consent. That's the modern standard for medicine. That should be the case for you and your minor children. We shouldn't be allowing nine year olds to make vaccine decisions, as is the case in several states in the country. Questionable whether it was ever a good idea to give liability protection to a very powerful big industry for medical countermeasures and including this environmental thing. And one of the things that Kennedy often talks about is the need for gold standard science and transparency. So thank you very much, and I would be happy to answer any questions.

[Rep. Alyssa Black (Chair)]: Anyone on the committee have any questions? Well, thank you. We've been looking forward to having you in and happy you could come today. And thank you for our room filling up. Unusual, no one normally pays attention to us. Yes, Thank thank

[Mary Holland, President & CEO, Children’s Health Defense]: you for having me. I'm glad it worked out this year. And thank you for all those who came to attend. And I think, as you can see, this is an issue that people care deeply about on all sides of the issue. And I hope that you take that into account as you continue to consider bills. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.

[Rep. Alyssa Black (Chair)]: I think we can go on a break right now and allow our next What is next? Next, we have Vermont nurse and nurse practitioner.