In a victory for health freedom advocates, New York lawmakers failed to pass a bill that would have required healthcare providers to report the immunizations of people ages 19 and up to the New York State Department of Health or New York City Department of Health vaccine registry, unless the patients opted out.
Under existing law, healthcare providers must report immunizations administered to people under age 19, to the New York State Immunization Information System. Those over age 19 can consent to opt into the database, otherwise healthcare providers are not allowed to report the immunizations.
The current system requires healthcare workers to get verbal consent from patients 19 years or older in order to include their information in the database, according to John Gilmore, founder of the Autism Action Network.
The original opt-in law required written permission, but that’s no longer the case, Gilmore said.
“Theoretically, if you know your rights you could tell them to not include any information about you,” he said. “Then you just had to trust that your wishes were followed with no way to check if they respected your instructions,” Gilmore said. “It essentially makes it a mandatory system.”
The new legislation proposed this year would have replaced the “opt-in” system with an “opt-out” system, eliminating the need to obtain the patient’s written or verbal permission, Gilmore said.
The New York State Assembly passed the bill (A7154) on June 1, 2023. However, the Senate version (S1531) did not make it to a vote before the legislature adjourned late last week.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) last month sent a letter to key state lawmakers opposing the bill.
Gilmore celebrated the bill’s failure to pass. He told The Defender the bill is dead for now. Lawmakers will have to reintroduce it next year and “start from scratch to overcome all the legislative hurdles bills” needed to pass.
“The Assembly voted last spring to pass this bill, but since the Senate did not pass it and we are coming up to an election for the legislature in November, the Assembly would have to vote on a brand-new version of the bill,” Gilmore said.
Michael Kane, founder of NY Teachers for Choice, also welcomed the news. Noting that the proposed bill died just weeks after lawmakers withdrew a “dangerous” bill that would have allowed children to receive vaccines, drugs and surgical procedures without parental consent, Kane said such bills were politically risky in an election year.
“All bills in New York are dead now until January. Everyone is starting to campaign for the elections and primaries,” Kane said.
Database would be ‘central nervous system’ for digital passport system
Mary Holland, CEO of CHD, told The Defender that passage of the legislation would have facilitated future vaccine mandates:
“Medical decision-making should be a private matter between individuals and their chosen healthcare providers. The state should not be involved. The only rationale for a statewide registry for adult vaccines is to provide for subsequent vaccine mandates. CHD opposes mandates and registries that would lead to them.”
Sujata Gibson, a civil rights attorney who has represented plaintiffs in several New York cases challenging COVID-19 vaccine mandates, said:
“This legislation masquerades as an option but is, in truth, a Trojan horse paving the way for wider mandates. The notion of an ‘opt-out’ is a thin veil over its deeper implications. In practice, patients are rarely informed of their rights, and having a default reporting requirement opens the door for future encroachments on individual freedoms.”
“The only reason to know every single vaccine given to adults in New York is to know who did not get them,” Kane said. “That type of database would be the central nervous system for a state-wide digital vaccine passport system.”
CHD’s May 10 letter to key New York State legislators, co-signed by Holland and CHD General Counsel Kim Mack Rosenberg, cited several reasons lawmakers should reject the proposed bills, including constitutional questions.
According to the letter, the legislation would eliminate “the requirement of informed consent” as vaccine administrators would have had “no duty to seek consent” from patients before submitting their vaccination information to the state or city database.
The proposed legislation also contained “No safeguards against the State retaliating against individuals who refuse to consent to inclusion in the registry (even if vaccinated) or who make the decision not to take a vaccine or vaccines.”
“These bills convert private health information into public information,” the letter stated, noting that they “violate state and federal laws regarding physician-patient privilege and the right to privacy and seek to harvest data from unsuspecting patients who may later be targeted through this identifying information.”
The legislation also likely violated 14th Amendment privacy rights and “the individual interest in avoiding disclosure of personal matters,” the letter noted.
Health freedom advocates credited CHD’s efforts in helping to defeat the bills. According to Gilmore:
“We had a meeting with the Senate Health Committee Chair’s office in May. CHD’s Mary Holland was there, and she laid out the many legal problems with S1531 and she let them know in no uncertain terms that they would see CHD in court if they passed the bill.
“CHD prepared a legal memo outlining the problems with S1531 and we made sure anybody who was anybody in Albany got a copy of it and read it. CHD is crucial in this fight in New York. Their legal muscle is one of the most effective weapons we have.”
Kane also credited CHD with helping to make a difference. “There was a response. The response was that the bills went nowhere,” he said.
Gilmore summed up the win:
“We have stopped these bills because we have created a wide, diverse and deep network of organizations and people across the state who will fight for their rights and their families. We keep people well informed about where the bills are in the process and we are all over the legislators from the first day of the session until they crack the last gavel.”
‘Attack on informed consent and privacy rights’
As of 2018, Rhode Island and New Hampshire were the only states without an adult vaccination database of any kind. Rhode Island established its registry in 2020, New Hampshire did so in 2022.
There are key differences, though. Most states, such as Rhode Island, require patients to actively opt out of reporting their vaccinations to the state database.
However, New Hampshire established an opt-in system under pressure from privacy advocates, joining Texas and Montana as the only states that require healthcare providers to obtain permission before reporting vaccinations to the state database.
Kane said both opt-in and opt-out systems are problematic:
“With the opt-in, practitioners already violate the law — they just enter people regardless quite often. It used to be that you had to get written consent to put an adult in the database. Then it became verbal consent — that they don’t always follow. Now they want opt out.
“You see what the trend is — it is an attack on informed consent and privacy rights. There is no reason for the government to have their hands on our personal medical records. Period. Full stop.”
New York’s elimination of the religious exemption to vaccination in 2019, efforts to quarantine unvaccinated students in one New York county earlier that year and the strict COVID-19 restrictions the state implemented during the pandemic helped spur opposition to the proposed legislation, health freedom advocates said.
“The restrictions we faced during COVID were egregious, largely illegal, and in the long run, people began to recognize how damaging they were,” said Paul Jaffe, a plaintiff in a case that successfully challenged the quarantine of unvaccinated children in Rockland County, New York, in 2019.
This helped build a strong resistance to the Pharma-backed legislation, Jaffe said.
“When they started to illegally exclude kids from schools with no cases of measles in 2018, they made reference immediately to the registry at the Health Department of which kids were vaccinated and which were not. The registry is useful for compelling people to undergo medical procedures — in this case, vaccination — or lose rights,” Jaffe added.
Kane said the loss of the religious exemption, which stemmed from the 2019 Rockland County case, “was a major blow” — but said it “galvanized” advocates such as Gilmore and many ordinary citizens to go to Albany twice every year, at the beginning and end of the legislative session.
“This effort has led to medical freedom being viewed as a true political movement in New York and a voting bloc,” Kane said. As a result, “the New York Senate has lost almost all appetite for these bills.” In the last two years, he said, “none of these bills have even been voted on in committee.”
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Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/new-york-fails-enact-mandatory-adult-vaccine-registry/
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