National Vaccine Information Center to launch a research fundraising campaign

At the Oct. 2-4, 2009 Fourth International Public Conference on Vaccination sponsored by the non-profit National Vaccine Information Center in Reston, VA, 700 citizens from 44 states and 11 nations raised more than $100,000 to launch an international scientific research fundraising campaign to investigate health differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated children and identify those at risk for suffering vaccine injury.

NVIC’s Children’s Fund for Hope, Health and Healing will initially raise funds to create data collection systems and conduct small preliminary studies with a longer term goal of conducting a large 10-year clinical study. NVIC will also raise funds nationally to strengthen informed consent protections in U.S. vaccine laws and support health care workers seeking to protect their right to make informed, voluntary vaccination decisions.

“The people are taking back vaccine science from the institutions which have failed us,” said NVIC co-founder and president Barbara Loe Fisher. “We are not going to wait any longer for government and industry to answer the big question of whether one-size-fits-all vaccine policies using multiple vaccines during the past quarter century have contributed to the unexplained chronic disease and disability epidemic among our children. It is critical that independent researchers from multiple scientific disciplines act now to evaluate and protect the biological integrity of our children.”

“Show Us the Science and Give Us The Choice” was the theme of NVIC’s historic fourth international conference, which featured more than 40 scientists, doctors, constitutional and regulatory law experts, journalists, ethicists and consumer advocates speaking about the science, policy, law, ethics, and economics of vaccination. The international fund raising campaign launched by conference attendees is a collaborative effort by non-medical parents and grandparents joining with nurses, doctors and allied health professionals to raise independent funding for scientific research to answer outstanding questions about vaccine safety.

Vicky Debold, PhD, RN, who teaches health research methods at George Mason University and has served as NVIC’s Director of Patient Safety for three years, has been appointed Scientific Research Director for NVIC’s Children’s Fund for Hope, Health and Healing. She is assembling a steering committee of health research experts.

“We will leave no stone unturned in our efforts to understand why so many healthy infants and children are regressing after vaccination and becoming chronically ill,” said Dr. Debold, who is the consumer member of the FDA Vaccines & Biological Products Advisory Committee. “We owe it to our children to act now and not wait any longer for the institutions responsible for ensuring the safety of vaccines and vaccine policies to do the job.”

NVIC also appointed Dawn Richardson, co-founder and president of Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education (PROVE) as NVIC’s Director of State Advocacy. Ms. Richardson led the seven-year effort in Texas to successfully obtain conscientious belief exemption to vaccination in 2003. She will head NVIC’s grassroots advocacy education programs to secure informed consent protections in vaccine laws and prevent job discrimination of health care workers exercising informed consent to vaccination.

“There is too much abuse of executive power taking place at the state level when it comes to mandatory vaccination,” said Ms. Richardson, who supported grassroots and Texas legislature opposition to Governor Rick Perry’s 2007 Executive Order to vaccinate all sixth grade girls with Gardasil vaccine. “Parents and health care workers should have the right to make informed, voluntary vaccination choices and we are going to help them do that.”

Today, 1 in every 6 American child is learning disabled, 1 in 9 is asthmatic, 1 in 100 develops autism, 1 in 450 is diabetic and millions more suffer with seizures, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, bi-polar disorder and other chronic illnesses that are dramatically increasing among children. NVIC’s scientific research program will evaluate health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals; identify potential high risk factors for adverse responses to vaccination; and investigate the biological mechanisms for vaccine injury and death.