Please take action to stop Senator Brad Hoylman's Senate Bill 3200 to make flu shots mandatory to attend pre-school and K-12 school in New York. The lack of efficacy and the many safety issues with flu shots are well known, which is probably why the vast majority of Americans refuse to get flu shots for themselves or their children, despite enormous advertising campaigns and pressure from some medical professionals. There is certainly no demonstrable compelling evidence that this assault on parents' rights is necessary for public health reasons. 

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Please use the panel to the right to send messages of opposition to your State Senator.

And call your State Senator's office and ask to speak to the elected official and let him or her know that you want them to oppose these bills. Talking points are below.  
 

Look up your State Senator here: https://www.nysenate.gov/find-my-senator

Look up your Assemblymember here: https://nyassembly.gov/mem/search/

Flu shots are readily available for any parent who wants to give them to their children at no cost. There is no reason to make them mandatory.

The official language describing the bill is inaccurate and misleading. The official description of the bill states, "Mandates influenza vaccine for children attending licensed daycare." The memo written by the bill authors only mentions preschool settings, but throughout the text of the bill influenza is included among the injections for K-12 students.

No state requires flu shots to attend K-12 Why should New York become the first.

Enforcing an annual flu shot would massively increase the administrative overhead for schools with no realistic expectation of a demonstrable improvement in student health. More to the point, who will pay for the additional staff needed to enforce annual flu shots for every K-12 and pre-school child in the state. 

Flu shots are not routinely recommended for children in the vast majority of developed democracies including Germany, France, Italy, the UK and Ireland. 

Flu shots are unpredictable and frequently completely ineffective. According to multi-decade studies of flu shot efficacy by the Cochrane Collaboration, inactivated flu shots in children age 3-16 reduce the risk of influenza in children from 30% to 11% on average. In some years, like 2017, flu shots have no measurable efficacy at all, even in the best-case scenarios devised by the flu shot manufacturers. In some years, children receiving flu shots are more likely to get the flu. There is insufficient data according to the Cochrane Collaboration to even say what effect flu shots have on children under 2, yet they would be required to get the shots.

New Jersey, Ohio, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, require flu shots for pre-schoolers But all of those states except Connecticut allow non-medical exemptions as of right. Since 2019 New York became one of only 5 states that allows no non-medical exemptions. 

Local Health Boards may impose influenza requirements if they so choose New York City's Board of Health imposed a regulation requiring flu shots for attendance at daycare and pre-school programs regulated by New York City, but they have published no data showing any improvement in child health as a result.

Some flu shots in the US (approximately 20%) are still made using Mercury, an obsolete in the form of thimerosal an obsolete preservative that is banned in New York for shots given to pregnant women and children under three.

The Hochul administration has illegally suspended our law banning mercury containing shots for the past several years misusing language in the bill that allows the state to suspend the law if there is a declared shortage of mercury-free flu shots. There has never been a declared shortage, but Health Commissioners suspend the law anyway.

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