Michigan Democrats Aim to Deny Parents Vaccine Exemptions
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Children’s Health Defense (CHD) reports how Michigan House Democrats are proposing a series of bills aimed at using state power to surveil and coerce parents into vaccinating their children as a condition for public school entry.
I am quoted in the article as a journalist and father in Michigan who’s been fighting the state’s medical authoritarianism and the public school system’s unlawful discrimination.
I wrote an article about this issue in July titled “How Michigan Schools Unlawfully Deny Enrollment of Unvaccinated Children”, which is somewhat mistitled for brevity because families of what the establishment describes as “undervaccinated” children are affected, too. My article includes a legal memorandum that explains the issue.
Shortly after, I followed up with a post titled “🚨ACTION ALERT: Michigan Parents, Tell MDHHS It’s Not Above the Law!”, which includes a link to a petition by the fantastic organization Michigan for Vaccine Choice (MVC).
As explained in my memorandum, Michigan law recognizes the right of parents to determine their children’s education and to make their own informed choices about childhood vaccinations.
The state at the same time aims to achive high vaccination rates among the population, so the law contains provisions stating which vaccinations the bureaucrats think children should receive before attending public school.
In an attempt to reconcile the policy goal of high vaccination rates with the right to informed consent, the law requires parents to submit to the school or daycare either vaccination records or a written exemption statement to the effect that the vaccination requirements cannot be met due to religious convictions or other objection to vaccination.
But schools throughout the state have been denying enrollment to children by unlawfully rejecting written exemption statements and falsely claiming that parents must obtain a “certified waiver” through the local health department.
This stems from a Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) administrative rule that’s being used to try to impose extra-statutory requirements on parents. The rule’s aim is to get parents to attend what is perversely called an “education” session about vaccines to obtain an MDHHS-issued “immunization waiver form”.
While not technically subagencides of MDHHS, local health departments are creatures of state law; they receive state funding and are charged with administering and enforcing Michigan’s Public Health Code, which makes them effective local enforcement arms of MDHHS policy.
Of course, as an executive agency, MDHHS has no lawmaking authority and cannot impose requirements on parents beyond what is in the statute.
Because parents in Michigan have been organizing to fight back against this abuse of power, Michigan Democrats now want to not only codify the MDHHS administrative rule into law, but also to expand on the presumed authority to coerce parents into vaccination.
Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, who is also quoted in the CHD article, has an article with links to each bill with a helpful summary for each.
As he told CHD, “These bills collectively undermine not only the right to decline a medical intervention but also the right to do so without penalty, surveillance, or forced disclosure.”
Naturally, those proposing these legislative changes describe the agenda as being to “Empower Parents, Protect Communities”, even though they literally aim to disempower parents from protecting the health of their own children, which requires absence of state coersion.
In essence, the House Democrats want to turn schools into surveillance operations to track and report student medical records so that a minimal vaccination rate can be enforced for school attendance.
In addition to codifying the MDHHS administrative rule into law, the bills would:
- require parents to explain their reasons for seeking a non-medical exemption, basically admit to being an irresponsible parent who is putting their own child and others at risk, and consent to their child being excluded from school “if the local health department” or MDHHS “recommends excluding the child as a disease control measure.”
- require schools to obtain private health records from families (as is already done) to report to the state the student population rates of fully vaccinated, partially vaccinated, and waiver-exempted students;
- require schools to notify parents by several means (individual message, school website, and paper notice in the school office) about “the immunization status of each pupil” in the school (the Democrats claim to mean a notice of anonymized and aggregate vaccination rates, but I just quoted the actual frightening wording of the bill);
- update the existing state vaccination registry to publicly disclose “the immunization status of school-aged children in this state, by school building” (again, they claim to mean anonymized, aggregate data, but the plain tyrannical language of this bill says otherwise);
- direct MDHHS to “prescribe minimum percentage levels of immunization for children in a school” and, if falling below the prescribed level, require local health departments to take “appropriate action, including immunization clinics, to raise the immunization level”.
In effect, the changes to Michigan law that House Democrats are proposing would not merely require schools to report overall anonymized and aggregated vaccination versus exemption rates, as they are deceitfully claiming.
Instead, the plain language of their bills is designed to threaten public disclosure of private health information and to create a vaccination-rate enforcement framework to deny children a public education even when parents have fully complied with the exemption requirements of Michigan law.
Please share your thoughts about this in the comments below, and if you are a parent in Michigan seeking to fight this escalation of medical tyranny, please reach out to me so we can coordinate efforts.
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