Blacklisting and Censorship Violates
Freedom of Thought, Speech and Conscience
by Barbara Loe Fisher
Freedom of thought, speech and conscience are inalienable natural[1] and civil rights recognized in America and in countries where respect for autonomy[2] and protection of bodily integrity [3] [4] [5] places limits on the power of the state. Under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Americans have the legal right to peacefully dissent and “petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” [6] The freedom to use our intelligence and follow our conscience [7] [8] [9] is absolute when we make a decision that involves taking a risk of injury or death for ourselves or on behalf of our minor child, [10] and the freedom to speak in the digital public square about what that means should be absolute as well.
This is a commentary about a special report I have researched and written on the systematic abuse of parents with vaccine injured children and the silencing of my voice and information published by the charitable National Vaccine Information Center in the digital public square both before and after the declaration of a coronavirus pandemic in 2020. I have submitted the report to the US House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. [11]
Entitled “The Silencing of Barbara Loe Fisher and the National Vaccine Information Center in the Digital Public Square: A Violation of Freedom of Thought, Speech and Conscience,” the report is anchored with more than 300 live linked references. [12] It contains information about the collaborative actions taken by government officials, political operatives, corporations, academic and financial institutions, media, philanthropic foundations, and global governmental organizations to target, discredit, discriminate against and censor me and NVIC for our mission since 1982 to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths through public education, and to defend the legal right of Americans to make voluntary decisions about vaccination without being coerced or sanctioned for the decision made. [13]
NVIC’s Long Record of Vaccine Safety and Freedom Advocacy Targeted for Censorship
In researching this report, I was shocked and saddened by the evidence I found to substantiate that I and NVIC have been blacklisted, even though we have a long, transparent credible public record of working responsibly in the U.S. with the federal and state governments, and urging others to do the same. [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] It is clear that we have been subjected to demonization and sanctions because for four decades we have exercised our right to dissent and criticize the safety and effectiveness of government recommended vaccines, and we have asked federal health officials to fill in vaccine safety science knowledge gaps, and we have worked in the states to reform U.S. public health policies and vaccine laws.[20]
I spent three months researching and writing this report because I wanted to understand who, what, when, how, and why NVIC was ghosted on the Internet and my voice was silenced. While we were being demonized and our presence on the Internet was slowly being suppressed - particularly between 2009 and 2019 - which was followed by de-platforming from four major social media platforms and Pay Pal in 2021, [21] [22] [23] I and NVIC’s staff and volunteers were so busy trying to deal with the blocking of public access to our information that we did not have time to stop and analyze exactly who was responsible. We poured all of our resources into educating and empowering Americans at the grassroots level in support of the legal right to make informed and voluntary decisions about vaccination. [24] [25]
The decades of grassroots education and advocacy that NVIC has performed, particularly at the state level between 2010 and 2020 through the online NVIC Advocacy Portal, culminated in a national rejection of proposed COVID vaccine mandate bills for children to attend school in America. [26] All 50 state legislatures refused to mandate the federally recommended COVID-19 vaccine for children as a condition of receiving a private or public school education, even though the government mandated the vaccine for federal employees and large private corporations as a condition of employment. [27]
It is an historic milestone in the history of state-based grassroots advocacy that no legislature in America forced parents to choose between denying their children a school education or injecting them with a biological product recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a product which has proven to be highly reactive and unreliable in preventing infection and transmission. [28] [29] [30] [31]
The Rise of the Censorship/Disinformation Industrial Complex
In my report, I take the reader on a chronological step-by-step journey from 1982 through 2023, giving an overview of the history of the vaccine safety and informed consent movement in America against the backdrop of the creation of a global mass vaccination infrastructure facilitated by public-private business partnerships encouraged and funded by Congress. [32] I describe the major players who, for the past decade especially, have sought to block online conversations about vaccination that do not conform with government and World Health Organization policy, and have used public opposition to vaccine mandates as a political tool to help build what is being aptly characterized as the “Censorship Industrial Complex” or the “Disinformation Industrial Complex.” [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38]
In the early 1980s, parents of DPT vaccine injured children went head-to-head with the mandatory vaccination lobby led by the pharmaceutical industry, public health and medical trade, and we managed to secure historic acknowledgement in the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 that vaccine safety should be made a national priority. [39] [40] That accomplishment was based on the fact that federally licensed and recommended vaccines for children, which are mandated by states, can and do injure and kill a minority of them. [41] Acknowledgement of that inconvenient truth in the late 20th century, a truth still often denied by those conducting the business of vaccination, planted the first seeds that grew into a national and international Censorship Industrial Complex in the 21st century, which targets not only “vaccine hesitancy,” but a cross-section of political, economic, cultural value and belief issues.
Connecting the Dots on the Silencing of Vaccine Policy and Law Critics in the Digital Public Square
In this report, I have told the story from an eyewitness perspective of a mother whose child was brain injured by a crude pertussis vaccine in 1980 that could have been made safer; [42] and as co-founder of a charity that worked for 14 years to get a less reactive pertussis vaccine licensed for America’s babies in 1996; [43] [44] and as the author of referenced articles and books; public presentations and television debates; congressional and state legislature testimony; and video commentaries that have been posted on NVIC.org’s four websites and in other forums on the Internet since 1995. [45]
I have connected the dots so the reader can appreciate the scope and influence of the great wealth and political power held by those who have built the spider web of a global infrastructure institutionalizing censorship of freedom of thought, speech and conscience about vaccination and health, especially in the new digital public square.
I provide readers with live links to papers, articles and documents using language to denigrate individuals and groups that criticize vaccine policy and law that were published by or under the guidance of individuals associated with the United Nations, [46] [47] [48] [49] [50] U.S. Department of Homeland Security, [51] [52] [53] [54] Director of National Intelligence, [55] Department of State, [56] Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation; [57] Department of Defense; [58] Department of Health and Human Services; [59][60] [61] the US Surgeon General, [62] and other government agencies.
There are links to published evidence that big philanthropic foundations and think tanks, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, [63] [64] [65] Rockefeller Foundation, [66] Bloomberg Philanthropies, [67] World Economic Forum [68] and Aspen Institute, [69] as well as organizations representing Big Pharma, like the Sabin Vaccine institute [70] and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, [71] [72] [73] have funded and collaborated with universities and government agencies and for-profit media companies like NewsGuard [74] [75] [76] [77] to urge censorship of free speech;
There are live links to reports by a foreign political operative, Imran Ahmed, who founded the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) in the United Kingdom, [78] and has spread false information and engaged in defamatory attacks on me, NVIC and a number of speakers, who presented at NVIC’s Fifth International Public Conference on Vaccination: Protecting Health and Autonomy in the 21st Century, that was held online in October 2020. [79] [80] He created the first blacklist of individuals and organizations like NVIC targeted for defunding and elimination from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and You Tube, [81] [82] [83] [84] [85] a blacklist that was used by government officials and media outlets to put pressure on social media companies to silence my voice and NVIC’s presence on the Internet.[86] [87] [88] [89] [90] [91]
In my report, there are live links to medical literature and media articles in which professors at major universities and medical organizations hurl abuse at parents of vaccine injured children and call for those they label “anti-vaxxers” to have their freedom of speech taken away, including professors and doctors affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, [92] [93] University of Pennsylvania, [94] [95] [96] Emory University, [97] Baylor University, [98] [99] New York University, [100] [101] Stanford University, [102] [103] Brown University,[104] University of Washington, [105] University of California, [106] Mayo Clinic, [107] George Washington University, [108] Harvard University, [109] and more. [110] [111] [112]
Some have called for physicians sharing information with patients about vaccine risks and failures that does not conform with government policy to lose their medical licenses, [113] [114] and for Americans who decline vaccines for themselves or their children to be sued and fined and arrested. [115] [116]
When I finished and reviewed the report, I thought to myself: it reads like a crime novel. That is because the blacklisting and censorship of ordinary Americans, who are treated like enemies of the state simply because they exercise freedom of thought, speech and conscience, is a crime that should never have happened.[117] [118] [119]
NVIC Struggling to Overcome Blacklisting, Needs Help
Today, NVIC is struggling to survive. We are doing everything we can to stay on course and connect with parents desperately searching for information they need to protect their children from harm, information we did not have when we were young parents and had been kept in the dark by the very same players who are operating the global Public Health Empire and Censorship Industrial Complex today.
We need your help because people tell us over and over again, that when they conduct online searches, it is almost impossible to find NVIC.org, a website we established in 1995 and today is the oldest and largest consumer operated website on the Internet publishing information about vaccines and diseases.
They tell us they don’t know about the NVIC Advocacy Portal, a free online communications network that helps residents of every state work to protect their legal right to make vaccine choices for themselves and their children; and to protect their medical privacy from being violated in electronic vaccine tracking systems; and to protect their right to hold a job without getting every government recommended vaccine.
Most people don’t know that NVIC publishes a digital weekly journal newspaper at TheVaccineReaction.org, which was re-launched online in 2015 after being founded in print published form in 1995.
And they don’t know they can read descriptions of vaccine reactions filed in the federal vaccine adverse event Reporting System by going to the MedAlerts.org website, a user friendly search engine that NVIC has sponsored since 2006.
Before being blacklisted, NVIC was in touch with hundreds of thousands of Americans every day on major social media platforms and we had a stable donor base. Now, if anyone shares NVIC’s well referenced vaccine information or talks about vaccine safety concerns on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, their accounts are in danger of being cancelled so they can’t have conversations with friends and family members online.
Mothers tell us that, if they ask a doctor a question about vaccine reactions ,or want to alter the CDC’s vaccination schedule and give their infants and children fewer vaccines on one day, they are thrown out of the doctor’s office and their children are denied medical care.[120]
A lot of people tell us they are afraid that one day, they will be forced to get vaccines they don’t want, or be fired from their jobs, or denied medical insurance or a passport, or blocked from entry to a hospital when they or loved ones become ill - or worse. [121]
We all remember what was done to Americans in the name of public health and national security during the COVID19 pandemic emergency declaration. We remember how sick we or someone we cared about felt after suffering a COVID vaccine reaction. [122] Many are still suffering from the long-term effects of those vaccine reactions, just like many of us are still suffering from the long-term effects of having been infected with SARS-CoV-2, [123] a mysteriously mutated virus that appears to have leaked from a Chinese biohazard lab that received U.S. federal agency funding. [124]
We want to be free to talk about what we think about all of that with our friends, family and colleagues in the virtual public square, which is the First Amendment right of every American. And when we realize our cell phones and computer searches are being secretly monitored by government and Big Tech, and we are blocked from speaking freely on the Internet about health and vaccination issues we care deeply about, we know something is very, very wrong.
This Shameful Era in US History
I never imagined that after I had spent more than two decades serving as a consumer member on federal vaccine advisory committees and responsibly participating in public engagement projects, begging government officials to do the science to identify gentic, epigenetic, and other biological high risk factors that make some individuals more vulnerable to suffering vaccine reactions so their lives could be spare, that I would be thanked with overt discrimination and abuse. I was devastated to learn that government officials have worked with political operatives, corporations, the media and academic institutions to characterize public conversations about vaccine risks and failures as a threat to national security in order to pejoratively label me and others as “anti-vaxxers,” using words like “malignant” and “domestic threat actor,” for the purpose of blacklisting and justifying the silencing of our voices in the public square. [125] [126] [127] [128]
This is not the America my parents and I grew up in. It is not the America I want my children and grandchildren to grow up in. And I am not alone.
I know that my life’s work and the mission of NVIC in memory of the vaccine injured is - and has always been - just. And I know the truth will shine bright and clear when all the evidence about this shameful era in U.S. history is revealed by others with access to far more information than I have. [129]
In the meantime, I and the staff and volunteers at NVIC will not be silent and surrender to the Censorship Industrial Complex. As we have done for 41 years, we will stand and defend the natural right of all Americans to freely choose when and for what reason we are willing to risk our life or the life of our minor child without being punished by the state.
Because if the state can tag, track down and force individuals against their will to be injected with biologicals of known and unknown toxicity today, then there will be no limit on which individual freedoms the state can take away in the name of the greater good tomorrow.
Please read my report and share it with everyone you know. Join NVIC’s mission and take action to educate your friends, family and community about vaccination, health and autonomy. Please make a donation to NVIC during this 14th Annual Vaccine Awareness Week.
Be the one who never has to say you did not do today what you could have done to change tomorrow.
With your help, NVIC’s mission will continue:
No forced vaccination. Not in America.
References:
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[7] National Constitution Center. Freedom of Conscience. 2023.
[8] Fisher BL. The Moral Right to Conscientious, Philosophical and Personal Belief Exemption to Vaccination. Invited oral presentation to the National Vaccine Advisory Committee (NVAC) May 2, 1997.
[9] Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition. Moral Conscience, the Judgement of Conscience (I); the Formation of Conscience (II); To Choose in Accordance with Conscience (III), and Erroneous Judgement (IV). Section 1, Chapter 1, Article 6. St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church Accessed Oct. 22, 2023.
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[11] US House Judiciary Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
[13] National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). About Us: Mission & Vision; History.
[14] Fisher BL. National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine Vaccine Safety Forum. Invited presentations to public workshops of the IOM Vaccine Safety Forum: Vaccine Adverse Event Detection Methodologies and Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting and Data Collection and Adverse Event Response Methodologies and Where Do We Stand? Nov. 6, 1995; Vaccine Safety Research Needs: Perspective from Parents Apr.1,1996; Risk Communication and Vaccination May 13, 1996.
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[43] Institute of Medicine Vaccine Safety Committee. Adverse Effects of Pertussis and Rubella Vaccines. Appendix B: Pertussis and Rubella Vaccines: A Brief Chronology. Pertussis Vaccines 1982, 1985. Pp. 323-324. Washington, DC. The National Academy Press 1991.
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[51] 2019 Public-Private Analytic Exchange Program - M Peter (FBI), Alexander S (Fannie Mae), Cambridge A (MITRE Corp.), Farner SR (National Oilwell Varco), Kang R (Booz Allen Hamilton), Kiefer S (NC4), Vallandingham C (University of Florida Levin College of Law, F Laci (FBI), G Michael (FBI), M Katie (Northern California Regional Intelligence Center). Combatting Targeted Disinformation Campaigns: A Whole of Society Issue. Department of Homeland Security October 2019
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[53] US Department of Homeland Security. DHS Needs a Unified Strategy to Counter Disinformation Campaigns. DHS Office of Inspector General Aug. 10, 2022.
[54] 2021 Public-Private Analytic Exchange Program - M Peter(FBI), F Laci (FBI), H Kate (State Department), W Kathryn (CIA), Cambridge A (Mitre Corp), Faner SR (Baker Hughest), Kang R (Booz Allen Hamilton), Takayama K (Palo Alto Networks), Vallandingham C (University of Florida Levin College of Law). Identifying Domestic Actors. Pgs. 18-21. Combatting Targeted Disinformation Campaigns: A Whole of Society Issues (Part Two). Department of Homeland Security August 24, 2021.
[55] Ibid.
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[65] Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Meet our funders and partners. Accessed Oct. 23, 2023.
[66] The Rockefeller Foundation. Mercury Project to Boost Covid-19 Vaccination Rates and Counter Public Health Mis- and Disinformation in 17 Countries Worldwide. Aug. 3, 2022.
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How you’re helping
Your donation is making a real difference! Thanks to your support for NVIC’s work, we can:
​
1. ADVOCATE to make vaccine safety and the legal right to exercise voluntary, informed consent to vaccination a national priority.
2. DEFEND freedom of thought, speech and conscience and other civil liberties in America.
3. CALL for more and better quality science to anchor public health policies and laws
4. RESEARCH AND PUBLISH well referenced information on vaccine science, policy, law and ethics to empower individuals to make educated decisions about vaccination and health.
5. ORGANIZE grassroots support for securing strong informed consent protections in state and federal government vaccine policies and laws.
Every contribution brings us one step closer to living in a world where everyone can make informed vaccination decisions voluntarily without fear of being coerced or punished by anyone for the decision made. Together, we're creating a brighter and healthier future. Thank you for being a part of this vital mission.