Jane Orient reminds us of her anti-vaxxer nature — not just of COVID vaccines but of all of them — in her June 27 WorldNetDaily column ranting that people should be exempted from getting vaccines for any reason or no reason at all:
An exemption is something people get from military service or jury duty – a civil obligation that serves the common good, that is, the good of everyone.
Everyone benefits when the country is secure from a hostile invasion and from having a guaranteed right to trial by jury. Not everyone is fit to serve, and some have more important obligations, or conscientious objections. Therefore, we allow for exemptions even though people have a civic duty to participate in essential functions if they can.
But for medical treatments, the person prescribing the treatment must get permission. Operating on a person, injecting him, or even touching him without permission is assault and battery, except when there is a life-threatening emergency or an imminent danger to others. One does not need an exemption to forgo a medical treatment. One simply declines to get it.
Except with mandated vaccines.Even if theoretically allowed, vaccine exemptions may be impossible to obtain. In some schools or enterprises, virtually all medical exemptions are denied. The person may have to present documentation of an almost fatal reaction to previously receiving a component of the vaccine. Many doctors refuse to help because of realistic fear of being delicensed if they support “too many” or “inappropriate” exemptions.
It may be easier to get a religious exemption, but one may have to prove the validity or sincerity of one’s faith. Who has the legitimate authority to judge that?
Because there’s basically no legitimate faith that credibly opposes vaccines? She continued:
This situation is backwards. For a prescription drug or for many lab tests, you must have a physician’s order. The doctor is legally obliged to have a patient-physician relationship with you and to be responsible for side effects or for following up on test results. But who is ordering your COVID jab or your COVID test? Is that person qualified to be your doctor? Even if he is, you are under no obligation to follow your physician’s advice, and patients frequently don’t.
Who gave officials or employers or pharmacies an exemption from getting a physician’s order?
Orient’s longtime anti-vaxxer activism shows she cares more about politics than medicine, which would seem to be a disqualifier for her to be a legitimate medical doctor. Yet she continued to whine:
We no longer treat persons with Hansen’s disease (leprosy) like lepers. (Fortunately, it is now curable and not very contagious.) We do, however, treat incompletely vaccinated children like lepers, excluding them from school or social activities. Unlike HIV disease or untreated Hansen’s disease, the “vaccine preventable” childhood diseases are contagious for only a few days in a child’s entire life, and most are usually mild. You cannot get measles or other disease from a child who does not currently have it. After recovery, the child has better immunity than a vaccinated child.
We draft unwilling persons into vaccination for the “common good” – to protect the hypothetical immunocompromised child who can’t be vaccinated, just in case there’s a disease outbreak, and that child might get infected by an unvaccinated child rather than by a vaccinated person whose immunity wore off. Instead of shielding the vulnerable, we force everyone to take the risk of a serious or even fatal adverse reaction to something they believe offers them no compensating benefit. An unvaccinated but healthy person is not an imminent danger.
Government has exempted itself from the Constitution, and physicians have exempted themselves from the Oath of Hippocrates.
It’s time for citizens and patients to deny these self-conferred exemptions and to assert their right to grant or withhold permission for medical treatment, according to their own values and risk-benefit assessment.
Just one problem with that: People who are being scared into doing their own “research” on vaccines by anti-vaxxers like Orient tend to fall into rabbit holes of misinformation. There’s no reason for a layperson to have to figure out the complexities of science and medicine , and there’s no reason not to trust a credible medical professional regarding vaccines, which have been repeatedly proven safe.
Orient simply wants to perpetuate misinformation to keep her misinformation organization — the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons — alive, largely because it pays her well to spread misinformation about vaccines. That’s a conflict of interest — not to mention dangerous medicine.
P.S. Orient’s reference to leprosy is highly ironic since the journal her AAPS publishes is notorious for a discredited article by a non-physician blaming illegal immigrants for an explosion of diseases, particularly leprosy. The author had claimed there were 7,000 new cases of leprosy in the U.S. in a three-year period; in fact, that number occurred over 30 years. Orient has yet to correct the article, despite the falsehood having been exposed 15 years ago when it was repeated by then-CNN host Lou Dobbs.