State Senator Monica Martinez (D-Suffolk County) has sponsored a bill (S7168) that protects the medical exemption from vaccine mandates by restoring the clear intention of the letter of the law: the medical judgment of a child's physician shall prevail, and his or her decision may not be overridden by school or public health authorities.  

Obtaining a medical exemption in NY is almost impossible. New York has the lowest rate of medical exemptions of any state at 1 in 1000 students according to the CDC. New York City is even lower at 1 in 2000. Obtaining a medical exemption is so difficult that families are often forced to choose between needlessly endangering their child or losing the child’s right to attend school.

This bill would take school administrators and the NYS and NYC Departments of Health out of the decision-making process, and places it wholly under the control of the attending physician, which is exactly what the letter of New York law already requires. S7168 would put an end to the strong-arm tactics of the State Department of Health, and NYC's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, whose main goal is to maximize vaccine uptakes, regardless of the consequences for the health of those who are forced to receive the shots.

TAKE ACTION

Please use the panel to the right  to send a message to your State Senator asking him or her to co-sponsor the S7168.  

And please call your State Senator’s office and politely ask him or her to co-sponsor the bill. 

https://www.nysenate.gov/find-my-senator

TALKING POINTS

New York Public Health Law Section 2164, Paragraph 8 is explicit:

"If any physician licensed to practice medicine in this state certifies that such immunization may be detrimental to a child's health, the requirements of this section shall be inapplicable until such immunization is found no longer to be detrimental to the child's health." 

The law says the decision is up to the child’s doctor. But over the years, the NYC and NYS Departments of Health progressively encroached on the authority of the doctors actually treating children, and allowed school personnel with no medical credentials to routinely override the medical decisions of physicians, thereby allowing school employees to practice medicine without a license, which is a felony in New York.

The Departments of Health bully doctors and schools with threats of investigations and loss of medical licenses into not writing or accepting legitimate medical exemptions. 

Schools also frequently reject the attending physician’s opinion and defer to consultant physicians hired by the district who never examine the child under consideration. 

The child’s physician has a legal and moral obligation to put the best interest of the child first. The school district’s physician has no such obligation, and usually defer to supporting policies to maximize vaccine uptake, and avoid hassles with the Departments of Health, regardless of potential risks to the child in question.

Before 2019, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of families, in New York had the experience of a physician telling them that their child should not receive some or all vaccinations for medical reasons, only to be told by the physician to go get a religious exemption because they were either afraid of retaliation from the Department of Health or afraid that the medical exemption would be denied.  

New York's legislators were well-aware of this situation in 2019 when they voted to repeal the religious exemption. We thoroughly documented the problem and spent hundreds of hours explaining the situation to legislators.  They knew that thousands of families would be faced with the choice of either pulling their children out of school, many of them with special needs, or subjecting their children to vaccines that their physician, sometimes multiple physicians, had told them could do lasting injury to their child.  But they voted for the repeal anyway.

In August of 2019 Governor Cuomo made the situation much worse with new NYS Department of Health regulations that only allow a medical exemption when a child has already had a documented near-death anaphylactic reaction to a previous vaccine. The clear intent of the law was to allow physicians to use their judgment to protect children from potential harm, the regulations now pervert that goal and at best only allow possible protection from a second injury. 

Advocates of the repeal of the religious exemption made a great deal of noise about the need to protect immune-compromised people, at the very same time, they were making it nearly impossible for immune-compromised people to be protected.

The result is that getting a medical exemption in New York became extremely difficult, and nearly impossible in New York City. Before the regulations were made more stringent, only 1 out of 500 New York State students had medical exemptions, which is less than half the national average, and in New York City the rate was even lower at 1 out of 1000. But since then, those rates have declined by half.

This bill will restore a measure of sanity to New York's insane vaccination policy and puts the health of the child first. It does not create a policy based on informed consent, which is the only acceptable policy in any country that claims to be a democracy that respects individual rights, but it is an important step in the right direction and will help get thousands of children back in school.

Please share this message with friends and family, and please post to social networks while we still can.

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