Interview: The War on Informed Consent

by Jeremy R. Hammond Sep 8, 2021

In this interview, I illuminate how the government has been waging war on our right to make our own informed choice about vaccinations.

Irecently had the pleasure of discussing how our right to informed consent is under assault by the federal and state governments with Seth Simmons of the Close Minded Podcast. Our discussion centered around the story of Dr. Paul Thomas, whose license was suspended by the Oregon Medical Board on transparently false pretexts, the true reason being that he posed a threat to state policy by respecting the right of parents to make their own informed choice about childhood vaccinations.

I expose the false pretexts and illuminate the assault on our fundamental human rights in my new book The War on Informed Consent: The Persecution of Dr. Paul Thomas by the Oregon Medical Board.

We also discussed the assault on our rights in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the political agenda of mass vaccination that was tied from the start with the authoritarian “lockdown” measures.

I really appreciated the great introduction that Seth did as a prelude to our conversation. As he elucidates, it’s not about being “pro” or “anti” vaccine but about being for or against informed choice and about thinking for ourselves rather than placing blind faith in public health authorities who have proven themselves over and over to be unworthy of our trust. Topics we covered include:

An explanation of the right to informed consent and why it is imperative that we fight to defend itHow the government is waging war on this fundamental human rightsHow doctors who respect parents’ right to make their own informed choice about childhood vaccines, such as Dr. Paul Thomas, are being attacked by state governments

• How Dr. Thomas went from practicing medicine the way he was trained to in medical school to being “vaccine risk aware” and opening his own clinic founded on the principle of respect for informed consent

• How Dr. Thomas challenged the medical establishment by writing The Vaccine-Friendly Plan to help parents make their own informed choices about each vaccine for their children

• How even questioning the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule is tantamount to heresy against what we can appropriately describe as “the vaccine religion”

• How one positive outcome from the COVID-19 pandemic is a growing public skepticism toward public health authorities and growing public knowledge about things like the existence of natural herd immunity and how immunity is about much more than just antibodies

• How Dr. Thomas was censured by the Oregon Medical Board for heeding parents’ requests to order measles antibody tests for children so that, if they already had evidence of immunity, they wouldn’t need to undergo an unnecessary second dose of the vaccine, even though Oregon law specifically allows for antibody testing as evidence of immunity

• Why natural immunity to pertussis (whooping cough) is vastly superior to the immunity conferred by the aluminum-containing pertussis vaccine

• What we know and don’t know about the phenomena of “original antigenic sin”, “linked epitope suppression”, and “antibody dependent enhancement” and the COVID-19 vaccines

• How natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 has been shown to induce long-lived immunologic memory so that if previously infected individuals are ever re-exposed to the virus, their immune systems will be able to mount an effective response to prevent or rapidly clear a reinfection, but how we don’t yet know whether vaccines will induce the same robust immunologic memory

• Why natural immunity is much broader than vaccine-conferred immunity and so will be more protective against existing variants and any mutated versions of SARS-CoV-2 that might emerge in the future

• How mass vaccination for pertussis has put evolutionary pressure on the bacteria so that today all strains in circulation in the US lack a protein called pertactin, which is a key antigen component of the vaccine, and how mass vaccination for COVID-19 could drive the emergence of a SARS-CoV-2 variant that escapes vaccine-conferred immunity

• How the Oregon Medical Board demanded that Dr. Paul Thomas produce peer-reviewed evidence to support his approach of respecting parents’ right to make their own choices about childhood vaccinations, but then, after Dr. Thomas published a study showing that the unvaccinated patients in his practice had significantly lower rates of diagnoses and office visits for a broad range of health conditions, the board emergently suspended his license on the transparently false pretext that he posed a threat to public health

• How the editors of the journal in which Dr. Thomas published his study retracted the study without identifying even a single problem with it that would justify retraction; on the contrary, the editors refused a proposal from Dr. Thomas and his coauthor Dr. James Lyons-Weiler proposal to publish the anonymously written letter that led to the retraction along with their response to that letter’s criticisms

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