Landmark Federal Court Ruling
by: Mark Sircus Ac., OMD
Medical News
This past Monday, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued a preliminary injunction halting the Pentagon from "inoculating service members without their consent." He ruled that the anthrax vaccine used in the Pentagon's mandatory program was "an investigational drug," being used for an unapproved purpose. That means that the Pentagon has been in violation of the Nuremberg Code and has been using its own troops as guinea pigs against their will. The injunction is the result of a class action lawsuit brought by military personnel and civilians working for the Pentagon. In his ruling, Sullivan pointed to the apparent risk in receiving the anthrax vaccination, noting that the rate of adverse reaction was recently revised upward from 0.2 percent to between 5 percent and 35 percent.
Dr. William Winkenwerder, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs discarded such accusations saying, "We do not use service members as guinea pigs." Dr. Winkenwerder, rejected suggestions that the Pentagon was experimenting on the troops but Judge Sullivan, in issuing the injunction, wanted to make sure saying "The United States cannot demand that members of the armed forces also serve as guinea pigs for experimental drugs." "We stand behind this program," and "the anthrax vaccine is safe and effective," said Dr. Winkenwerder but it has been long suspected that Gulf veterans are suffering short and long-term effects of unproven anti-bacteriological warfare inoculations forcibly administered to troops by U.S. Army doctors in Saudi Arabia. But according to the General Accounting Office the vaccine is not as safe as advertised reporting that adverse reactions to the vaccine to be at double the rate claimed by the manufacturer, BioPort Corp. "This vaccine has been controversial, and it has caused serious reactions in some individuals," said Rep. Dan Burton, from Indiana.
Dr. Meryl Nass reported on other government’s investigations into what is known as the Gulf War Syndrome and found that the Canadian Department of National Defense, not quite believing or trusting the Pentagon either, hired Goss Gilroy Inc. to study the health of Canadian Gulf Veterans and look at various exposures. They found a significant relationship between receiving non-routine biological warfare immunizations and developing chronic fatigue, a very common symptom of Gulf War Syndrome. In 1999 the British also examined the issue and found that receiving the anthrax vaccine was related to developing an illness consistent with Gulf War Syndrome. They wrote, "Vaccination against biological warfare and multiple routine vaccinations were associated with the CDC multi-symptom syndrome in the Gulf War cohort." The French Ministry of Defense stood behind the English and Canadians stating, "multiple vaccinations given during the war, particularly those for anthrax, botulinum and plague, seem associated with an excess of Golf War Syndrome signs and symptoms. In an unconfirmed report it was said that French military personnel in the Gulf region, numbering the same as the British contingent, had been prevented from taking the vaccines on the direct orders of the French Commander-in-Chief. The story claimed that since the end of the Gulf War, not a single member of the French military has suffered from Gulf War Syndrome.
After the federal court injunction the New York Times reported one senior Pentagon official as saying that the anthrax vaccine would continue to be administered, but only to those who did not object. "It won't be mandatory," the official said. "If they object, they won't get it. We don't strap people down to the gurney and make them take the vaccine." But Pentagon officials said that several hundred military personnel declined the vaccine and many of them have been severely punished with court marshals or dishonourable discharges. Many more who would have liked to decline the highly dangerous small pox and anthrax vaccines but were threatened with such punishment and this is what the court has put a stop to.
Ironically the Nuremberg Code was promulgated by four American judges acting under the authority of the U.S. military. The key principle is the requirement for informed, voluntary consent by the individual subject of experimentation. “The Code makes no exceptions for members of the military or the exigencies of war. During the first Gulf War, the FDA granted a waiver permitting the use of pyridostigmine bromide and anti-botulinum vaccine, without consent. This was the first instance in which an official government agency officially sanctioned the direct violation of the Nuremberg Code,” stated Jane M. Orient, M.D., Executive Director, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons in written testimony submitted to a Subcommittee on National Security, in 1999. According to Doctor Orient mandatory vaccine programs are “A violation of the Nuremberg Code in that they force individuals to have medical treatment against their will, or to participate in the functional equivalent of a vast experiment without fully informed consent.”
For all practical purposes the military has been, in their own way, strapping their personal down to the gurney tables and jabbing them with a vaccine that contains formaldehyde, a substance totally intolerable to biological systems. And the FDA, on the testing of five different lots of the anthrax vaccine, found trace amounts of the additive squalene in it. This finding contradicts repeated assertions by the Pentagon that squalene is not present in the vaccine. U.S. Rep. Jack Metcalf, R-Washington, who has investigated this vaccine additive for three years, told a congressional committee that this raises serious questions about the vaccine's safety and the truthfulness of Pentagon officials. And to seal the coffin data published in the February 2000 and August 2002 issues of Experimental and Molecular Pathology strongly suggests that the anthrax vaccine contaminated with squalene causes Gulf War Syndrome.
Fortunately for military personal there are people like Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, who has called on the Pentagon to reopen the cases of all military personnel punished for declining the vaccine. Shays issued a statement demanding that the Defense Department "immediately begin a review of all disciplinary actions taken against those who refused the vaccine." The Pentagon won't admit to the real number of officers and enlisted members who have refused the shot and been punished, but by their own calculations, it is nearly a thousand.
For those who find it hard to believe that Americans would aggressively force their own to take dangerous vaccines know that on June 30, 2003 the Pentagon made public reports on cold war programs that tested the vulnerability of American forces to unconventional attack. They admitted and identified 5,842 people who may have been exposed to chemical or biological agents in deliberate experiments. It is known that deadly substances like VX and sarin had been sprayed on sailors, ships and even on American soil. And then we have the infamous Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of defense, who is single-handily responsible, as former CEO of the G.D. Searle Company for the worldwide distribution of approximately 800 million pounds of aspartame, a chemical used in diet drinks and thousands of other products that breaks down into formaldehyde. The Pentagon is not exactly staffed with people the public can trust.
According to Judge Sullivan six deaths are officially attributable to the anthrax vaccine. SGT Sandra Larson of Fort Riley, Kansas died just 30 days after completing her series of Anthrax shots. Her sister, Nancy Rugo, says the young NCO "went from a healthy woman just four weeks prior to her death - June 14, 2000 - to having no bone marrow, platelets and an extremely low count of red and white blood cells. It was as if there was something in her that was killing her immune system, shutting her down." And two panels convened at the Pentagon's request declared that multiple vaccinations administered to reservist Rachel A. Lacy of suburban Chicago probably caused her death. Lacy received several vaccinations in one day — for anthrax, smallpox, typhoid, hepatitis B and measles-mumps-rubella. The reservist got the shots March 2 at Ft. McCoy and died a month later. This habit of giving multiple vaccination shots in one day is now a horror happening in children’s clinics everywhere and this is being done without one scientific study to indicate either the safety or sanity of such practices. The Pentagon is not the only organization experimenting on the public, not the only ones breaking the Nuremberg Code.
Hundreds in the army reserve and National Guard have resigned rather than take the required series of six inoculations. Retired Air Force LTC Redmond Handy, who resigned his officer's commission rather than participate in what he calls a "terrible crime against our men and women in uniform," warned "there are others currently at risk because of this flawed vaccine. I'm afraid SGT Larson's death won't be the last," he said as he wondered, "When will the Pentagon end this madness?"
Dr Daniel H Duffy Sr. said, “Mandatory vaccination is the most repugnant idea ever put forth by organized medicine. It gives the government power to invade our most private space, our bodies.” For many, mandatory vaccinations put one in mind of the eugenics of Nazi Germany. The demand to yield to mandatory injection of a foreign substance into a human body is repulsive to most intelligent people and scientists. Surely Judge Emmet G. Sullivan deserves the Nobel Peace prize for single-handily stopping the Pentagon and a particular class of people in the scientific community (NIH, CDC, FDA, AMA, WHO, and the APA etc.) who feel that it is their divine right to coerce or scare the public into taking dangerous vaccines. It is these people who sing songs of vaccine safety no matter how many children and adults die from vaccines or fall to chronic syndromes with no cure.
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