Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate and the current Vice President under the Joe Biden administration, previously served as Attorney General for the state government of California, during which time she served the financial interests of pharmaceutical industry.
For that reason, she makes an appearance in my 2021 book The War on Informed Consent: The Persecution of Dr. Paul Thomas by the Oregon Medical Board.
Here’s the relevant excerpt:
Paul Thomas’s approach of grounding his practice in the principle of informed consent and focusing on health outcomes stands in stark contrast to the approach taken by the state government of violating informed consent to achieve high vaccination rates.
Oregon, of course, is not alone. All the states have taken the approach of mandating vaccinations for school attendance. In the extremity of its coercion, Oregon was outdone by California, which in 2016 passed a law eliminating “non-medical” exemptions.
However, that did not have the intended effect because it incentivized parents to go to pediatricians who are respectful of informed consent to obtain a medical exemption. The problem, as perceived by those myopically focused on achieving high vaccination rates, was that physicians might grant exemptions “for indications outside of accepted contraindications”, such as on the basis of “family medical history”.
The law was considered to “work” not based on whether it achieved a healthier childhood population but whether it increased the childhood vaccination rate. Pediatricians who would write medical exemptions for reasons such as the patient having a family history of autoimmune disease were regarded as “accomplices”—as though by enabling parents to exercise their right to informed consent they were engaging in criminal activity.
The state Senator who spearheaded the elimination of “non-medical” exemptions, Dr. Richard Pan, subsequently introduced a bill he described as being intended strengthen “oversight” of physicians to stop them from writing “fake” medical exemptions, which were those found by the state “to be fraudulent or inconsistent with contraindications to vaccination per CDC guidelines.” (Emphasis added.)
With the passage of that bill into law in September 2019, the state declared for itself the authority to revoke medical exemptions written by licensed physicians, with the clear warning communicated to doctors that if they write exemptions for any reasons other than CDC-defined contraindications, the state was going to come after them for their “unscrupulous” behavior.
Richard Pan expressed his view on the matter very clearly in a commentary in the AAP’s journal Pediatrics. When physicians write medical exemptions to state vaccine mandates, he wrote, it is “not the practice of medicine but of a state authority to licensed physicians” who are “fulfilling an administrative role” on behalf of the state.
Thus, in Pan’s view, the state’s proper role is to insert itself into the doctor-patient relationship by dictating how pediatricians should practice medicine, and informed consent for the parents is not an option.
Hellbound and Down 