The Enduring Legacy of the National Vaccine Information Center and ICPA
When I first met ICPA founder Dr. Larry Webster in the fall of 1992, he had gathered some of the greatest leaders of principled chiropractic adjusting children—including the late Dr. Arno Bernier, Drs. Mike and Pat McLean, and Dr. Jim Sigafoose—for a meeting in a classroom in a northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. The small U.S. charity established in 1982 by parents of DPT vaccine injured children, first known as Dissatisfied Parents Together (DPT) until it became the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) in 1989, had been in existence for a decade and I was invited to give a 20-minute presentation on what I knew about vaccine reactions. When Dr. Larry reached out to mothers whose infants and children had been harmed by vaccines, he set in motion an association between NVIC and ICPA that has spanned more than 30 years and has touched the lives of countless families in the U.S. and around the world.
By the time I was introduced to the brave, high-spirited community of principled chiropractors, I had co-authored the 1985 book DPT: Shot in the Dark with medical historian Harris Coulter and, in 1986, Kathi and I had led parents of DPT vaccine injured children in the first public demonstration ever held in front of the Centers for Disease Control to protest the toxicity of the crude whole cell pertussis vaccine in DPT shots.
NVIC was feeling the full force of a medical establishment unhappy with the public conversation that parents of vaccine injured children had created with our persistent calls for more and better quality vaccine science and reform of the public health system, specifically respect for the informed consent ethic with the inclusion of flexible medical, religious, and conscientious belief exemptions in the vaccine policies and laws of all states. NVIC co-founders had done battle on Capitol Hill between 1982 and 1986 with the pharmaceutical industry, public health officials, and medical trade associations lobbying Congress for blanket liability protection during creation of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. The 1986 Act was historic acknowledgement by the U.S. government that childhood vaccines can and do cause injury and death.
When the 1986 Act was passed by Congress, we had managed to hold Pharma legally accountable for product design defects and hold doctors legally accountable for medical malpractice. Importantly, the law also contained informing, recording, reporting, and research provisions in an effort to reform the monolithic U.S. vaccination system, including creation of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) that between 1990 and July 2024 has logged in more than 2.6 million reports of vaccine-related adverse events. But by 1993, the Act’s safety, federal compensation, and liability provisions had been gutted by weakening congressional amendments and by federal agency rule-making authority for the purpose of turning back the clock and once again denying the widespread existence of vaccine injuries and deaths.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, NVIC was the only national organization in the U.S. talking about vaccine risks and failures and publicly opposing mandatory vaccination laws. We didn’t have the internet or cell phones. We used snail mail, landline telephones and whatever media coverage we could get to raise public awareness. And by 1992, with only $2,000 left, Kathi and I were tired, broke, and close to giving up because there was no hope in sight.
After my short presentation in Northern Virginia, Dr. Larry urged me to stay the course. He and Drs. Bernier, McLean, and Sigafoose donated money so I could travel to Boston to speak to about 200 doctors of chiropractic with pediatric and family practices in the U.S. and Canada at ICPA’s Second Annual Conference in March 1993. When I got through speaking in Boston to a standing ovation, the dynamic grandfather of pediatric chiropractic, Dr. Larry Webster, called on the audience to give me a reason to keep NVIC’s doors open.
I left Boston with nearly $8,000 in donations. With the encouragement and support of the pediatric chiropractic community giving us renewed energy and hope, Kathi and I decided to reorganize and press on with NVIC’s mission to prevent vaccine injuries and deaths through public education and defend the legal right to make voluntary vaccine decisions in the U.S. without being sanctioned for the decision made.
It was in Boston and then in Atlanta later that year, when I spoke at Dynamic Essentials (DE) to the students and graduates of Life College, that I learned how the founders of Chiropractic—DD and BJ Palmer—had been attacked for more than a century for criticizing the heavy reliance by medical doctors on pharmaceutical drugs and surgeries and for showing people a more effective, less toxic way to heal and stay healthy. That dissent against medical orthodoxy by DD and BJ Palmer included publicly opposing mandatory smallpox vaccination laws in the 19th century and other vaccine mandates that came along later.
The missions of both NVIC and ICPA focus on protecting the health and wellbeing of children and empowering their mothers and fathers to make informed choices about how to heal and stay well. The vitalistic philosophy of chiropractic, which acknowledges the existence of a universal intelligence and the body’s innate ability to lean toward health if interference is removed, aligned with NVIC founders’ respect for the natural order and our early criticism of one-size-fits-all vaccine laws that fail to respect individual differences between people and violate the natural right to autonomy and the human right to informed consent to medical risk taking. Our mutual understanding of the importance of freedom of thought and conscience when choosing preventive health options that do not heavily rely on the medical model’s pharmaceutical product use, has been a foundational reason why ICPA and NVIC have had such a long association.
Today, the public conversation about vaccination, health and autonomy, which parents of DPT vaccine injured children started in the U.S. in 1982, is the number one topic of conversation in homes, workplaces, hospitals, capitals, and courtrooms around the world. NVIC has grown from a micro charity with a few hundred followers, to one that has hundreds of thousands of followers and reaches millions of people all over the world through NVIC’s four websites:
NVIC.org, our flagship website established in 1995 is the oldest and largest vaccine information website in the world continuously operated by a non-profit organization with more than 1,500 pages of well-referenced information.
NVICAdvocacy.org, a free digital communications and legislative action network established in 2010 to keep users informed about vaccine-related bills introduced in state legislatures so they can take action to protect informed consent rights in state public health policies and laws.
TheVaccineReaction.org, a free journal newspaper founded in 1995 became a digital weekly publication in 2015 to promote “an enlightened conversation about vaccination, health, and autonomy.”
MedAlerts.org, a user-friendly VAERS search engine created in 2003 and sponsored by NVIC since 2006 informs the public about adverse events reported after vaccination to the government.
In educating the public about vaccination throughout the 1980s and 1990s and into the first decade of the 21st century, NVIC co-founders defined and debated vaccine science, policy, law, and ethics on multiple national television and radio shows and in mainstream print media. We researched and produced print publications and created a large library of inspirational videos and podcasts about the importance of defending the right to autonomy. We were appointed as consumer representatives on federal advisory committees and at the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, where we articulated the concerns of the victims of vaccine injury and death and called for research and compassionate reform of vaccine policies.
We successfully lobbied to replace the crude whole cell pertussis vaccine in DPT with a less toxic acellular pertussis vaccine in 1996 and, in 1999, to replace the live oral polio vaccine that sheds and can cause vaccine strain polio with an inactivated polio vaccine that does not do that. We took a stand in public forums, including testifying in state legislatures and in Congress, to raise public awareness about the risks and failures of vaccines like chickenpox (1995); hepatitis B (1998-1999); smallpox and anthrax (2001); HPV Gardasil (2006); and H1N1 swine flu (2009) and COVID shots (2020).
We coordinated and sponsored five international public conferences on vaccination in 1997, 2000, 2002, 2009, and 2020 featuring scientists, physicians, journalists, attorneys, bioethicists and included chiropractor speakers and sponsors. At NVIC’s 2020 conference, NVIC honored Dr. Jeanne Ohm, who was mentored by Dr. Larry Webster and served as ICPA’s CEO for 17 years after his death, with a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award for her “commitment to supporting the natural pregnancy and birth experience for women and for her dedication to improving the health of children.”
Between 1982 and 2024, the federally recommended childhood vaccine schedule dramatically expanded from 23 doses of seven vaccines (Polio, DPT, MMR) given between two months and age 6 to an astonishing 73 doses of 18 vaccines given between the day of birth and age 18, although the mRNA COVID shot is a genetically engineered biological product that manipulates cell function and is not a traditional vaccine, while the RSV shot is a monoclonal antibody product. During that time, the pharmaceutical-medical trade-public health lobby pressured most state legislators to add new vaccine requirements for children to attend daycare and school, while California, New York, Connecticut, and Maine lost the religious exemption to vaccination. But many state legislators have responded to NVIC’s call to respect the informed consent ethic and through grassroots action taken by families, chiropractors, and health freedom organizations in every state, most state legislatures have voted to keep vaccine exemptions in place and are beginning to resist new vaccine mandates.
The grassroots vaccine risk awareness and informed consent movement that NVIC launched in 1982 and expanded since the 1990s is primarily responsible for the fact that no state legislature in the U.S. mandated the COVID shot for children to attend school.
NVIC’s success in raising public awareness about vaccine risks and failures has come with a price. In 2021 during the COVID pandemic declaration, which included a federal vaccine mandate that affected millions of American workers, NVIC was targeted for censorship and elimination from the digital public square on the World Wide Web by national and global health agencies and political operatives working with corporations that own social media platforms. Between March and September 2021, NVIC was removed from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. In December 2021, 18 members of the House of Representatives from one political party wrote a letter to the CEO of PayPal requesting that NVIC be defunded. On Dec. 21 without warning, donations to NVIC were blocked. After Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X), NVIC’s account was restored in February 2023, but our charity continues to be blacklisted by the other three social media platforms even though the pandemic emergency declaration has ended.
The COVID shot given to more than 80 percent of Americans, mostly over age 12, has generated 1,644,209 adverse event reports to VAERS as of July 2024. Nothing has changed when it comes to the pharmaceutical industry, medical trade, and government health officials denying the reality of vaccine injuries and deaths. But over the past four decades and especially over the past four years, everything has changed when it comes to people all over the world having a much greater understanding that vaccines carry a risk of injury or death that can be greater for some, and should not be mandated.
It has been 44 years since I watched my healthy two-year old son suffer a convulsion, collapse and brain inflammation within hours of his fourth DPT shot, and 42 years since I watched the Emmy award winning documentary DPT: Vaccine Roulette and then joined with other parents of pertussis vaccine injured children to establish the charity known today as the National Vaccine Information Center. When I testified in the U.S. Senate in February 2024, I said:
“Today, everybody knows somebody who was healthy, got vaccinated and was never healthy again. Of all developed nations in the world, America has the worst infant and maternal mortality rates and is home to the most highly vaccinated, but the sickest and most disabled child and young adult populations. That inconvenient truth, that failing public health report card bankrupting our nation, is central to what we are talking about today.
Demonization of and discrimination against those who decline to get a government recommended vaccine—or talk publicly about how they or a loved one were injured or died after vaccination—has been going on since the 19th century. But what is happening in the 21st century in the name of disease control, national security and ‘the greater good’ is escalation of an historic denial of vaccine risks and failures that has become a dangerous assault on freedom of thought, speech and conscience and poses a grave threat to the biological integrity and natural rights of the people.”
We have a lot of work yet to do to protect the natural right to autonomy and the human right to informed consent to medical risk taking in America.
We have a lot of work yet to do to protect the natural right to autonomy and the human right to informed consent to medical risk taking in America. Knowledge is power and NVIC has a long history of providing well-referenced information that has served as a catalyst for public conversations about vaccination, health, and autonomy impacting public health policy and law.
Knowledge is power and NVIC has a long history of providing well-referenced information that has served as a catalyst for public conversations about vaccination, health, and autonomy impacting public health policy and law. We are thankful for the role that principled doctors of chiropractic have played through sharing of NVIC’s information with families and through donor support by ICPA members that help make it possible for NVIC to continue our work.
Please join our mission by registering at NVICAdvocacy.org to work to protect vaccine freedom of choice in your state. Become a subscriber of the free NVIC Newsletter and The Vaccine Reaction journal newspaper at NVIC.org and stay up to date on vaccine science, policy, and law so you can have informed conversations with your family and friends and members of your community. Make a donation to NVIC if you can.
You can be the one who never has to say you did not do today what you could have done to change tomorrow. It’s your health. Your family. Your choice.
