This letter is in response to two separate hit pieces against parents opposed to HB 5044 from Hearst Media (Colin McEnroe and Ken Dixon, 3/1/20).

There is a lot of fear mongering surrounding HB 5044, a bill that would repeal Connecticut’s longstanding religious exemption to the school vaccine requirement.  This bill is one of many just like it in Democrat-controlled states throughout the nation, as the “Party of Choice” has sold its soul to the Pharma devil.  In Connecticut, the person carrying Pharma’s financial football is House Majority Leader Matt Ritter.

What Hearst hasn’t told you is that Ritter is a partner at the law firm Shipman & Goodwin and that likely their largest, most lucrative client is vaccine maker Boehringer Ingelheim.  In addition, Ritter’s father, himself a former speaker of the house in Connecticut, is cashing in on his life in our legislature as a paid lobbyist and one of his clients is that same vaccine company, Boehringer.  Rather unbelievably, the husband of the other representative most responsible for HB 5044 – Liz Linehan – works for that very same vaccine maker.

The simple facts are these:  Our religious exemption was part and parcel of our first school vaccine requirement in 1959 and it has never been a problem.  Connecticut currently has one of the highest vaccination rates in the country at 96%. There hasn’t been an outbreak of anything in this state for decades, including during the 2000s when Connecticut had the national high vaccination rate of merely 91%.  Despite the media hoopla over two outbreaks in Hasidic Jewish communities in New York last year, the U.S. is STILL considered to have “eliminated measles” for now its 19th consecutive year. In short, there is NO REASON FOR THIS BILL, other than to further line the vaccine makers’ pockets; apparently the $60 billion in global vaccine profits projected in 2020 are not enough.

Moreover, several independent analyses have revealed that the school data released by the now highly politicized Department of Public Health, which data Ritter and Co. are using to support the claimed “need” for this bill, is incomplete and otherwise highly flawed.

Regardless of your personal stance on vaccines, there is simply no reason to tamper with our highly effective, 60-year old statutory vaccine scheme at all, let alone trample our religious liberty.

On that note, if one is religiously anti-abortion there is ample reason to object to vaccines regardless what the Papal pedophile-shuffler in Rome may say, as many are cultured in cell lines derived from aborted fetuses and contain foreign human DNA from those aborted fetuses.  That is one of many reasons why thousands of people – many the parents of vaccine injured children – showed up for the public hearing on on Feb. 19 and why hundreds of them stayed until 8:20 a.m. the next day to have their three minutes of say, making it the longest public hearing in Connecticut legislative history.

This nationwide (and even global) push for compelled vaccinations is likely the defining issue of our time.  If we allow government to control what goes into ours and our children’s bloodstreams, this most beautiful experiment in self-governance based upon individual liberty that we call the United States of America, has failed.

Lindy Urso lives in Greenwich.

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5 Comments

  1. Those weren’t hit pieces on anti-vaxxers. Correcting misinformation is not an attack or a hit piece. Not one religion does not support vaccinations. I wonder how badly the people of Samoa wish they had the chance that Connecticut and other U.S. states have at avoiding a measles outbreak. Almost 3% of their population contracted measles due to low vaccination rates. Connecticut rates, and rates all over the U.S. only continue to drop as more and more anti-vaxxers insist other parents believe their lies and also refuse vaccinations. THAT is why these laws are being introduced to begin with. No one cares if you don’t vaccinate. But when you lie to other parents and scare them with propaganda that is incorrect and furthers your agenda and not public health, then the public has to get involved and #StopTheNonsense.

  2. Well said and dead on!

    It should also be noted that Rep. Ritter’s mother is an Appellate Court judge, if and when this issue comes before the court.

    There has already been a situation in the court involving this conflict.

  3. Just another anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist repeating the same debunked propaganda.

    No, this isn’t a money-making ploy by pharmaceutical companies to give us all poison.
    No, this is not against your religious rights.
    No, those parents don’t have “vaccine-injured” children. Stop trying to blame vaccines on autism!

  4. So the writer claims to be pro-religious rights yet calls the Pope “the Papal pedophile-shuffler in Rome”? How does this assist in the public discourse?

    “There hasn’t been an outbreak of anything in this state for decades…”

    It sounds as though the writer feels our state government should wait until there is “an outbreak of something,” when it may be too late. Lindy doesn’t sound as though he has a firm grasp on public health policy, nor does she seem to care that large numbers of children going to school without having required vaccines risks the health of other children, especially those with health issues or compromised immune systems.

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