Action Alert!
In the last week there has been vaccination legislation introduced into Victorian and South Australian state parliaments.
Time is of the essence to defeat these bills. Please take action now!
Victorian Legislation
The Victorian legislation seeks to make vaccination compulsory for health professionals and others who are employed in public health facilities.

Read the press release here 
The statement of compatibility by Minister Foley can be read here

The Bill and explanatory memo can be read here
This Bill makes amendments to the Health Services Act 1988 and the Ambulance Services Act 1986, which will allow the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to direct employers of healthcare workers across a range of healthcare settings in Victoria to require employees who are healthcare workers to be vaccinated against specified vaccine-preventable diseases.

These settings include public hospitals , denominational hospitals , private hospitals and ambulance services .

The Secretary’s direction will specify the settings and class of healthcare workers to be vaccinated and also specify the vaccinations that are to be required.
The AVN is working with a group of concerned health professionals who are determined to fight this legislation.

Please contact this group at healthfreedomvictoria@protonmail.com
Health Freedom Victoria
Below is a message from those on the frontline of this battle.

Thank you for making contact with Health Freedom Victoria! We need all the help we can muster to fight this draconian overreach of the Andrews’ Government in the form of the proposed legislation ‘Health Services Amendment (Mandatory Vaccination of Healthcare Workers) Bill 2020’.

As this Bill will likely be rushed through, we do not have much of an interval to register our concerns to the government, so time is of the essence. Health Freedom Victoria is asking health professionals (and everyone else) to write to ALL members of Victorian Parliament, both in the Legislative Assembly (Lower House) and in the Legislative Council (Upper House). 

Your email can be as detailed or as brief as you choose, but you must state you vehemently oppose the bill and why, and that you wish the politician in question to vote against it. If you are a medical professional, tell them! Only a small number of politicians hold degrees in medicine or health; you are well qualified to state your reasoning behind your concerns regarding this bill.
You need to then write to your local member for your electorate area.


After you have emailed your local politician – ring them! Speak to their secretaries and PAs. Have a conversation. Let them know why you oppose the Bill. Ask them for a meeting in person.
If you are unable or unwilling to attend in person, please contact Health Freedom Victoria as we have delegates of health professionals who can help. They can either attend with you or you can set up meetings with your local MP so that they can attend on your behalf.

After you have emailed all of the Victorian politicians, including your local member and spoken to his/her office, ring the office of Martin Foley, Labor MP who is the Minister for, amongst other things, Mental Health and Discrimination.

Tell him you are appalled that he is intending to change the words of the Discrimination Act to get away with forcing you to take an untested and unwanted medical procedure in order to keep your job. Tell his secretary you demand that he withdraw the Bill.

Martin Foley can be contacted at his electorate office on 03 96467173 or at his Ministerial office on 03 9096 7500. His emails are as follows: minister.foley@dhhs.vic.gov.au ; martin.foley@parliament.vic.gov.au

Please also make time to prioritize a strong email to Health Minister Jenny Mikakos and demand she withdraw the bill. Please also ring her office, regardless if she is your local member or not. Her electorate office number is (03) 9462 3966 and email is: jenny.mikakos@parliament.vic.gov.au Her Ministerial office number is (03) 9096 8561.

If you are in a Union – call them! In response to the calls our members have been making, the Union to date has been trying to fob off our people by saying that they are waiting on instruction from the Government. This is rubbish. The Union represents you – demand that they do. Threaten withdrawal if they do not oppose the Bill and speak out on your behalf. Be prepared to be strong! And then the next day – ring them again!

If you would like to attend any meetings at Victorian Parliament, please email healthfreedomvictoria@protonmail.com so that we can get you involved. If you need further instruction on how to set up a local meeting with your local member, please email us and we can talk you through the process.
Generic Letter-form for use
Although we strongly recommend that you write your own letter to MPs, please find below a form letter that you can cut and paste and customise if you would prefer that option.
Dear (Insert MP name here)

Re: Mandatory Vaccination for Frontline Healthcare Workers 2020

I am writing as a (concerned citizen, nurse, etc) to vehemently oppose the above Andrews’ Government Bill which seeks to remove the right to bodily autonomy of healthcare workers in the state of Victoria, including doctors, nurses, dentists, cleaners, receptionists, aged care workers and paramedics.

I am opposing the proposed Bill for the following reasons:

•     The Australian Immunisation Handbook, published by the NH&MRC, states that all vaccine recipients must provide free and informed consent to any and all medical procedures – vaccinations included. Coercive and mandatory vaccination legislation do not allow for this recommendation to be followed.

• The right to bodily integrity is a basic and inalienable freedom which governments can neither grant to citizens nor remove from them. 

•     The purported reason for this legislation being introduced is to protect the health of the public. Yet no evidence has been provided to show that healthy unvaccinated healthcare workers are any more of a risk than their fully-vaccinated peers. In fact, it is well-known that those who receive live-virus vaccines such as measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox and rotavirus can be infectious to others for up to 90 days following vaccination. If the health of the public were really the concern of this legislation, then these individuals should be blocked from having contact with patients for this period of time.

•    Whooping cough vaccination (part of the triple-antigen, Boosterix vaccine) has been shown to create a class of asymptomatic carriers who, whilst displaying no symptoms of infection themselves, can and do spread the infection to others. Several instances of outbreaks in hospital nurseries have been started by fully-vaccinated and recently-vaccinated staff members. Once again, it is not the unvaccinated who are the problem here.

•     Vaccines are not and never have been one-size-fits-all products. The number of those harmed and even killed by vaccinations is unknown, but it is far higher than the one-in-a-million figure so blithely thrown around by those who should know better. A search of Australia’s Database of Adverse Event Notifications (DAEN) shows 16,822 adverse reactions to vaccination with 50 deaths. It is admitted that this figure most likely represents only between 1 and 10% of the real statistic for vaccine harm. Taking away a well-informed healthcare professional’s right to choose not to expose themselves to a known risk of serious reactions or death from a medical procedure is not only immoral, it represents the worst and most dangerous form of government overreach one can possibly imagine.

•     There are over 270 new vaccines currently in the pipeline. Should this legislation pass, in the future, there is no upper limit for mandated vaccinations and no recourse for those who are harmed by these products. Healthcare professionals are not happy to give a blanket authority to the government which in turn will bear no responsibility for the harms caused by their policies. 

• Australia is currently in a crisis whereby we are losing health professionals at a fast rate. Hospital waiting lists are growing and the public health authorities are stretched to the limit. Should this legislation be passed, many doctors, nurses and other allied health professionals will choose to leave the medical field. People will not receive the care they require and this may result in tragic outcomes. The blame for this situation will be borne by those who would allow this discriminatory legislation to be passed. 

I will not support any politician who supports this legislation.

Yours Sincerely
(Your name here)

S.A. - No Jab No Play
There is a group already fighting the SA legislation. This is the action plan that the SA group would like everyone to follow.
ACTION STEPS TO TAKE TODAY:

  1. Go to https://check.aec.gov.au/ and enter your details. Note that this is reliant on your address details being up to date - however if you don’t have up to date details find out your ‘State District’ anyway, and email your ‘old’ Member of Parliament instead. We are looking to bombard our local members and want our voices heard!
  2. Once you’ve entered your details, you’ll see Which ‘Federal Division’ and ‘State District’ you are in – you want STATE DISTRICT.
  3. Open up this page: https://members.parliament.sa.gov.au/ and click on the heading ‘Electorate’ (along the weird greeny yellow bar) and it will sort alphabetically. Find your State District and click on your local members’ details.
  4. Copy and paste the local members’ email details into gmail/ymail/Hotmail/outlook/other
  5. Enter the following subject heading: ‘Request for documentation regarding the proposed South Australian Public Health (Early Childhood Services And Immunisation) Amendment Bill’
  6. Please CC the email to VISA visa@adelaide.on.net We want to collate who’s getting involved, keep you informed and try and cover electorates that haven’t been contacted as yet.
  7. Copy the below suggested email and READ the email through, make edits or add your own story if you wish.
  8. Send the email, and follow up with a phone call to the Local Members’ office within ideally half an hour, but at least by the end of the day – to confirm they have received your email, and will be sending you the Decision Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS). If they haven’t received your email, ask what the best email address is to send it to. In our experience probably around 50% of emails “disappear”, so a follow up call is essential.
  9. Remain polite and non-confrontational and advise the person that you will call back in 2 weeks to follow up if you haven’t received the RIS. Phone calls increase their workload, so they’re more likely to do their job to avoid getting repeat calls. 
S.A. - Email-letter-form
**********EMAIL TO COPY AND PASTE***********

I am emailing you regarding the recent South Australian Public Health (Early Childhood Services And Immunisation) Amendment Bill proposed in Parliament last week.

I am concerned that children are going to be excluded from receiving services that are universally known as being fundamental and imperative to the social, emotional and physical wellbeing and development of young children.

Children need these services to provide them with a solid foundation to build on when they begin school at the age of 5-6. This bill will see unnecessary negative consequences to children, especially given that South Australia's current vaccination coverage is at 94.62% for 1 year olds, and 94.9% for 5 year olds (note that the 2 year old vaccination rate cannot be relied upon due to changes in the vaccination schedule affecting this data -


Since vaccination rates are already so high and the consequences to young children are severe, the Government needs to demonstrate that these consequences are justified. Therefore, I would expect that the Government has addressed these issues in their Decision Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS).

I would like a copy of this RIS and I believe that it is also important that every politician also scrutinise this document prior to voting on the bill.

I am currently not aware of a compelling argument for implementing this legislation, especially given that organisations such as the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (a professional medical College of over 17,000 physicians and 8,000 trainee physicians) have advised against implementing any No Jab No Play legislation until a review of existing policies is undertaken.

I would appreciate an opportunity to discuss my concerns further in an appointment with you.

Regards
Our future is in our own hands. If you want to see this legislation defeated, please take action now!

Show up. Speak up. Be brave

Aneeta Hafemeister
Do you want a film screening near you?

We have had many, many people asking us to bring film screenings to their area and, whilst we are happy that you are interested, we also need you to be aware that putting on events such as this are both expensive and a lot of hard work!

Neither of these issues have stopped us before, but we are asking those who would like screenings to please contact us at avnenquiries@avn.org.au to say what area you live in and how many hours you will be available to help us in organising the event. We also hope that if we do bring the screening (or a seminar) to your area, you will be able to help publicise it amongst your networks to make it as well-attended as possible.

The AVN is a network meaning we need to work together with you - our community - to spread this message as far as possible.

We appreciate your help and commitment.
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How to End the Autism Epidemic
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The Moth in the Iron Lung: A Biography of Polio
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The HPV Vaccine On Trial: Seeking Justice for a Generation Betrayed
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Crooked: Man-Made Disease Explained: The incredible story of metal, microbes, and medicine - hidden within our faces.
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Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines
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Dissolving Illusions
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The Peanut Allergy Epidemic
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Annual membership to the Australian Vaccination-risks Network, inc.
$25.00
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