Versions of this article were widely shared as “Author Unknown” on social media, including a Facebook post via Dr. Sherri Tenpenny (which may no longer be available). It is also published on the New Jersey Coalition for Vaccination Choice website.

Whether you want all, some, or no vaccines, you must ask if you believe in medical freedom.

Do you want to live in a world where you cannot freely refuse a medical procedure that carries risk of injury or death?

I’m not questioning your comfort level with today’s vaccine schedule, because today’s vaccine schedule will change. New vaccines and additional doses are added all the time.

• Children today receive as many as 70 doses of 16 vaccines by age 16, which is over 15 times higher than the number of doses administered to children in 1940 and 3 times the number given in 1983.
• Vaccines are a $33 billion global market with projections to surpass $100 billion by 2025. Who will be getting all these vaccines?
• There are nearly 300 vaccines in the developmental pipeline for children and adults — and no end in sight.

Are you certain you will be 100% comfortable with the vaccines that will be mandated in 5, 10, 25 years?

No critical thinker, no honest person would ever sign off on the sight-unseen vaccine schedule of the future. And yet that’s what you’re doing when you condemn the people who are fighting for your right to refuse. Today, you have the right to refuse, should you ever choose to use it, because the very “anti-vaccine” people you demonize have been fighting for us all.

Right now, the burden of “herd immunity” — a false epidemiological construct designed to justify vaccine mandates — falls on small children, but that is changing. Vaccine manufacturers see an untapped market in adults and are coming for you next.

What will you do if your state, your employer, or your insurance company forces you to get a vaccine that you simply don’t want? Perhaps it hasn’t happened to you yet, but if the right to refuse is eliminated, it will and faster than you might think. Who then will you turn to?

• Our “representatives” who are besieged by lobbyists and get campaign donations from pharmaceutical companies?
• The CDC that has a revolving door with Pharma?
• Your doctors who fear being brought up on disciplinary charges and losing their licenses to practice?
• Mainstream media, which panders to industry and insists on politicizing a non-partisan issue? (U.S. is ranked #46 in the World Press Freedom Index 2014 behind Romania, Papua New Guinea, Slovenia, South Africa, Botswana, El Salvador, Latvia, Trinidad & Tobago, and Suriname among others. Haiti is #47.)

Who will you turn to if you ever want to say no?

There will be no one.

Have you noticed that some political and medical leaders are calling for a federal vaccine mandate and elimination of all exemptions? President Obama said: “There is every reason to get vaccinated  — there aren’t reasons to not.” Did you see what happened when New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said that parents should have some measure of choice when it comes to vaccination? (He was slammed but The Washington Post allowed me to give him some well-deserved air cover.)

Once we start down that slippery slope by removing an individual’s right to refuse medical procedures that carry the risk of injury or death, we open ourselves to an insidious new era where other drugs and procedures can be mandated.

I heard (on NPR, interestingly enough) that there are people who want to test for a gene marker that’s been found in mass murderers in the hopes that they can put the carriers of that gene on medications in early childhood. If you think that sounds great, consider this. Many of us carry genes that will never be expressed. You or your loved one could be a carrier of that gene. If we follow the “for the greater good” mentality behind vaccines – analogous to the Nazi’s “for the greater good” mentality behind eugenics to breed out illness — we could be looking at forcing people who may never express a “sociopathic gene” to take antipsychotics, just in case. Because that’s what forced vaccination does. It requires children who may never “express” a particular virus to accept a vaccine (with all its risks) just in case. And that’s what eugenics was all about. It sterilized people who could’ve passed on a genetic disease, just in case. (Did you know that the modern eugenics movement was born in the U.S.?)

The US government promotes, recommends, and mandates vaccination while compensating families for death and injury to the tune of $4 billion to-date, and while acknowledging through its own Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System that there have been hundreds of thousands of people who sustained catastrophic brain damage or other grievous injuries, or who have died as a result of vaccines.

Forced vaccination is a human rights violation. Any government that enforces it is at risk of losing moral authority over its people. 

Here is today’s playing field: Organized medicine, corporate philanthropy, and Big Pharma have marketing budgets larger than the GDP of some countries. The CDC has strings-attached funding to state health departments to promote vaccination. Industry and government are partnering to track and monitor us with electronic health records and immunization information systems. Media are calling for the unvaccinated to be penalized or jailed. Congress passed the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act granting near blanket liability protection to vaccine manufacturers for a product that is known to cause death and injury, acknowledged to be “unavoidably unsafe.”

As it stands today, you can’t sue a vaccine manufacturer if your child is injured or killed by a government recommended vaccine, even in cases in which the company chose not to distribute a safer vaccine (i.e., acellular versus whole cell pertussis) or when it failed to recall a contaminated or “hot” lot in a timely manner or if the product is determined to have a design defect.

Think about that. You can’t sue the manufacturer. Our government removed the only consumer protection with teeth. That immunity from liability does more to shake parents’ confidence in vaccines than anything else out there.

Louise is a leader of the New Jersey Coalition for Vaccination Choice. In 2008, over 700 citizens rallied for the freedom to choose in Trenton. The event made The Drudge Report and appeared in major and local papers across the country, including the Associated Press, ABC World News Tonight with Charlie Gibson, and Fox & Friends. She is a co-editor of the bestselling book Vaccine Epidemic.