 
A Message From:
Dawn Richardson
PLEASE DO WHATEVER YOU CAN to be at the capitol this Thursday on 5/3 early in the morning to attend and testify at a Senate Health and Human Serivces Committee hearing. I will be sending out more specific details by Sunday night and even more on Monday as we firm everything up, but I wanted to give everyone as much notice as possible. Big things are happening in the legislature threatening our rights as parents regarding vaccines and our ability to keep our kids records private and we need ENTIRE FAMILIES including CHILDREN with every person prepared to present a statement to the Senate Health Committee this Thursday. We especially need children here who have been hurt by vaccines and who are able to testify. It could be a long day, so try to make arrangements for family or friends to come with you to help with children because we will need as many parents as possible to stay in the hearing room for the duration of the hearing. We drastically scaled back our testimony in the House out of respect for a request by the committee chair and we got burned and buried big time because the doctors opposing us did not comply. In a nutshell, there are a handful of legislators who have initiated underhanded and questionable efforts to deny the right of parents to control what vaccines are given to their children while promoting making the vaccine tracking system intrusive to parents and completely abusive of medical privacy and informed consent rights. These legislators have gutted the compromised stakeholder bills that we supported and will be attempting to effectively remove the conscientious exemption part of these bills. An expanded registry especially without an effective easy to use exemption is a danger to our children. It is very disappointing to say that after all this work with all the stakeholders and supporters, HB 1702 and SB 1237 are being changed into things that we NEVER agreed to and therefor we cannot support them. Our senate sponsor, Senator Mike Moncrief, has gone back on his word to support the stakeholder version of the bill and is now going to be offering a committee substitute to remove the exemption in SB 1237 and just leave the registry changes. I confirmed these changes with his staff twice after hearing it from another legislator. We need to vigorously oppose the bill - especially the changes to the vaccine tracking system. Additionally, after being left pending in the House for 2 weeks, HB 1702 was passed 5:3 after midnight on Wednesday with an amendment by Representative Garnet Coleman that was never even presented to the bill author Representative Rick Green which would make the exemption go away if exemption rates went above 1 percent. Guess what - Texas is already at a 2 percent exemption rate under the terms of the amendment so this amendment is an underhanded attempt to makes sure that our exemption would never even see the light of day but all our kids' private confidential immunization records would still get dumped to the Health Department by our doctors and insurance companies without our consent! Please also be ready to follow our upcoming alert to fax and call Senate committee members with our opposition on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday with faxes and phone calls. More coming on this tomorrow and Monday. Please start looking at arrangements to be here in Austin on Thursday ready to testify and support and protect our parental and medical privacy rights by opposing this bill. If you have a chance and would like to educate yourself about the dangers of vaccine tracking systems and the controversial history of the one in Texas and how we were successful at making it one of the most protective of parental rights in the country, please link to our site at these locations: I'll leave you with these parting thoughts - Dr. Sharilyn Stanley, Associate Commissioner of Disease Control and Prevention from the Texas Department of Health, testified at the House hearing that 98% of the children in Texas have parents who WANT them to be tracked by TDH and their names are already in the registry and all they are waiting for is the data. All the surveys we've seen show that the vast majority of people OPPOSE their medical records being released to government agencies without informed consent. So who is telling the truth and do you know who is tracking your kids? Let's get ready to stop SB 1237! ------------------------------------------------------------------- PROVE provides information on vaccines, and immunization policies and practices that affect the children and adults of Texas. Our mission is to prevent vaccine injury and death and to promote and protect the right of every person to make informed independent vaccination decisions for themselves and their family. ------------------------------------------------------------------- This information is not to be construed as medical OR legal advice.
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