France Gears Up For Debate – Should Vaccines Be Compulsory?

Samia Larère and her husband Marc, a couple in France, risk two years in prison and a €30,000 fine for their refusal to vaccinate their infants, aged three and 15 months, against polio, tetanus, and diphtheria. The parents refused to inoculate their children because the only vaccines on offer also combined vaccinations for other diseases, including whooping cough, hepatitis B and meningitis, which are recommended but not obligatory.

Vaccination against polio, diphtheria and tetanus is obligatory for children and adults in France, the only European country apart from Italy to insist on inoculations against certain potentially fatal diseases. In October 2014, a magistrate decided to refer the couple’s case to the highest legal authority in France, the cour de cassation, to decide whether parents’ right to refuse inoculations is a constitutional issue, sparking a national debate on France’s strict laws on vaccines which had become “complicated, confused and unequal”.

In a May 2015 presentation, European Ecology Member of the European Parliament, Michèle Rivasi said that vaccine safety “as a general rule, is being questioned” [in France]. “Between 2005 and 2010, the proportion of French people in favour or very in favour of vaccination dropped from 90% to 60%. The percentage of French people between the ages of 18 and 75 who are anti-vaccination increased from 8.5% in 2005 to 38.2% in 2010. In 2005, 58% of doctors questioned the usefulness of vaccines administered to children while 31% of doctors were expressing doubts about vaccine safety. These figures must surely have increased since then.”

On August 1, to put an end to what she seems to believe is a debate driven more by rumors than science, French Minister of Social Affairs and Health Marisol Touraine called for a national debate this fall on the future of vaccination in France.

“I realize there are doubts over vaccines, and that this is more acute in France than any other European country. Transparency is the best medicine to treat unfounded scientific arguments… Getting vaccinated is not a luxury, nor is it purely an individual choice. The well-being of the nation depends on it,” Touraine told the French daily Le Parisien.

Big Pharma buys off the mainstream media in such obvious and bold fashion that there is absolutely no news coverage about vaccine accidents. And whatever vaccine issues they cover, they cover them with extreme bias.

In June, Robert F Kennedy Jr., speaking on behalf of those parents who want to maintain the right to choose whether or not to vaccinate their children, said, “I ate breakfast last week with the president of a network news division and he told me that during non-election years, 70% of the advertising revenues for his news division come from pharmaceutical ads. And if you go on TV any night and watch the network news, you’ll see they become just a vehicle for selling pharmaceuticals. He also told me that he would fire a host who brought onto his station a guest who lost him a pharmaceutical account.”

Neither pharmaceutical industry lobbying organization – the Club Avenir de la Santé (Future of Health Club) – (funded by GlaxoSmithKline) nor the mainstream media will be happy with Touraine’s announcement. If French people oppose vaccines in totality, how will pharmaceutical giants benefit from rooting for and producing GMOs and pesticides, to lower the level of general health, and peddle vaccines and drugs as a necessary answer?

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