Quackenboss goes to Washington

{Click over to the step-by-step call to action after reading this post}

I wasn’t going to write this blog until next week but my flight landed and clearly all of you are standing by to hear how today went, so I am sitting down the minute I walked into my house to update you.

This is going to be quick and dirty because it’s late and I haven’t slept after flying into and out of DC today and yesterday.  The background is that a few months ago I approached Tami Canal, the founder of March Against Monsanto (MAM), to strike a deal: if I gave her the link to watch Vaxxed before just about anyone else in the country, she would write a review of it and promote it on Facebook. Because of an incoming link to my blog earlier in the year I realized her position on vaccines for the first time– and the fact that the anti-GMO group isn’t united with the vaccine freedom group boggled my mind.  We’ve got to get it together. Long story short, she accepted.  Vaxxed lit a fire in her and I put her in contact with people who advocate on the federal level.  As kismet would have it, Tami is a constituent of Congressman Jason Chaffetz, who is the Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (OGR)– the committee charged with investigating the CDC Whistleblower hot potato. Because MAM has over a million followers, she was able to get a meeting with her Congressman and a half dozen of us convened in Representative Chaffetz’s office this afternoon without him knowing who was coming. Surprise! We brought Del Bigtree, one of the producers of Vaxxed, with us.

As Del said live a few minutes ago, we did promise not to talk about the details of the investigation because we would be compromising it.  You just can’t tell witnesses what other witnesses said, and I hope you can appreciate that as well as how hard it is for me not to tell you because you deserve to know the truth.  And one day this will be over and I will tell you all that I know.

In the meantime, I feel like I can tell you what WE asked and what WE said without telling you what Chaffetz said about the investigation.

Our meeting was scheduled for 1pm. Usually people are given 10, maybe 15 minutes with a Congressman and then someone is knocking on the door with an emergency.  On Tami’s insistence, his office confirmed that we would have a full hour.  A few days ago they tried to cut the meeting down to 20 minutes but ended up moving the time later in the day, and this afternoon they said that Chaffetz would be a half hour late because he needed to vote on 20 bills, but in exchange he was clearing his afternoon to spend time with us– without even knowing who “us” was.

We arrived at one and were seated in Chaffetz’s office with Fred Ferguson, Chaffetz’s Chief of Staff, and Sean Hayes, an attorney on the OGR committee.  From 1:10 to 1:35 we shot the shit about the movie while waiting for Chaffetz to arrive– his staff had seen it earlier.  Going off my notes, I think it’s OK for me to share that Sean Hayes said that the worst case scenario here (which doesn’t happen 99% of the time) would be that the OGR builds a full record against the CDC through document requests and makes criminal referrals.  I’m not sharing private information by saying this because that is simply what the OGR is there for.

However, these records are 14+ years old so I want you to sit with that for a minute and contemplate how gargantuan this task is. Also, the CDC has to cooperate to make that happen, and judging by the fact that the CDC investigated themselves and refused to share the results of that investigation with Congress, we can get a good idea of their level of interest in cooperating.

Now, this is the point where it’s easy to say, “But what about Flint!  They were all over Flint and had a hearing in 30 days!”  And that’s exactly what we did say. But it turns out that the OGR was quietly investigating Flint for a year and a half before the public ever found out about it so no, the OGR was not all over Flint in 30 days.  Also, the EPA had a vested interest in making the State of Michigan look bad so they were more than happy to cooperate in those document requests in record time. This is politics, don’t forget.

Chaffetz came in at 1:35.  We started to do introductions and honestly, there was a wee bit of hostility from some of our members because we’re sitting there with the impression that the OGR hasn’t done jack for nearly two years now, so Chaffetz had to walk into that. Some of us introduced ourselves and when it got to Del, Del just started talking.  He gave the history of Vaxxed, how he got pulled into it, and took Chaffetz through the timeline of it getting kicked out of Tribeca and going nuclear.

Del said that in the fall of 2014 when the Whistleblower story was never reported that it made him question the state of democracy. It would have been one thing to have the media address it and dismiss it, but no one said a word. It’s a sad statement to who is running the news in this country.

There was a huge smile from Chaffetz when Del commended him on how brave his staffer was to stand up in Utah, announce herself, and take questions from the crowd at their Vaxxed Q&A. He knows how to make a boss feel proud.

Del asked what he can say in the theaters when people ask about Chaffetz night after night but Chaffetz made it clear that he can’t broadcast what he’s doing, where’s he’s been, or where’s he’s going next.  It’s not how investigations are done. He can’t promise how this investigation will end.  It may not end with a hearing.  They may not ever be able to construct the record. We can’t hang everything we’ve got on one witness.

Chaffetz asked what we wanted to see happen beyond a Thompson hearing and this was our wish list.

One: that the power to police vaccine safety is taken away from the CDC.

Two: That the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act is repealed and pharmaceutical companies are responsible for the safety of their products.

Three: That the vaccinated vs. unvaccinated total health outcome study (Congressman Posey’s HR 1636) is conducted.

I asked him what I could pass along to all of you for ways that you could help.  He shared that his office has been slowed down by having to return phone calls to people demanding a hearing.  He knows we want a hearing– that message is received. His policy is to return all phone calls which means that sometimes three hours of a day are spent calling you back rather than investigating the CDC.  Don’t call anymore please.

He said that if we do get to the point of having a hearing that it would be great to be able to tap into a reservoir of personal stories. You can do this in two ways:

Make a 30-second video and send it to hearthiswellvideos@gmail.com (his staff will be checking the YouTube channel) and you can hand write a letter (yes, with a real pen and a piece of paper) and send it to him at Congressman Chaffetz 2236 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515.

If you live in states represented by members of the OGR committee, also send a personal letter to your Congressman.  Hand write your personal story and tell them you want the 1986 act repealed, you want vaccine safety to be taken out of the CDC, and you want Posey’s vaccinated/unvaccinated study conducted.  These states include Maryland, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, DC, Virginia, Tennessee, California, Utah, Texas, Georgia, Wyoming, Alabama, Wisconsin, New Mexico, and Ohio. You can find your Congressman by clicking here.  Don’t email, don’t call, don’t type a letter.  Hand write it and mail it.

I’m exhausted so I’m going to sign off but I want you to know that I fight for you.  I just spent $1,000 and took off from my work and family obligations to fly out for the chance of this meeting actually happening. Del asked me why I do what I do when I do not have an autistic child and my answer is because someone has to do it. I do this for all of you.

I wish I’d taken a picture of Chaffetz leaning back in his chair biting a pen in his mouth and grinning nearly ear-to-ear while listening to Del. Del could thaw a cold war. He was endearing and disarming and changed the energy in the room when he talked about how he’d changed political parties since coming upon the story of the CDC Whistleblower.

But, I did snap this picture in the beginning before Del turned on the charm and I’m risking Jason Chaffetz never hosting me in his office for the rest of his career, but I want to share it with you because you deserve to see it.

This is the face of a man who cares, people.  This is real.  You are not crazy. The CDC switching their study criteria midstream is known by this man and his team.  This meeting really happened today. And our one-hour meeting turned into a two-hour meeting, 90 minutes of which was spent with the Congressman. That is simply unheard of.

I hope I am not overstepping when I say that if you are a one-issue voter (and that issue would be parental rights) and Jason Chaffetz was running for president, he is the man you would want to vote for. You can trust me on that. He is doing his job here.  This situation may not end up how we want it to end up, but it is not for lack of Chaffetz and his staff working their asses off for us.

I wasn’t going to share this but since Del already did, I’ll repeat it here.  As we were closing up Chaffetz said, “If you leave here without receiving any other message I want you to receive this one: you have our attention.”

{Click over to the step-by-step call to action after reading this post}

_______________

Edit: I am seeing some people sharing a wiki-leaks type article from the end of 2015 with the bombshell that Chaffetz takes pharmaceutical money.  Nearly all elected officials accept campaign donations from pharmaceutical companies.  You’d be hard pressed to find many who don’t; Bernie Sanders comes to mind but even he took $100,000 from Kaiser, who doesn’t exactly have clean hands in this business of creating captured entities. I will direct your attention to anti-SB277 Senator Joel Anderson of California who told Polly during a Periscope interview on May 10th that even he takes pharmaceutical money and it has no bearing on how he votes. It was made clear to us yesterday that the CDC Whistleblower is far from the only investigation under the OGR right now, and that whatever Chaffetz plans to do in any investigation is not going to be announced in the news. Besides, if you actually read the Chaffetz article being passed around called “Chaffetz Uses House Chairmanship to Shield His Big Pharma Backers,” it doesn’t say he wasn’t ever going to hold a hearing about the drug company in question.  It said that one specific company wasn’t going to be the sole subject of a hearing. Accepting pharmaceutical money is not a litmus test for honesty.

I’ve also seen the accusation that Del and I are calling for people to “stand down.”  I’ve said no such thing. If you keep calling Chaffetz’s office on the phone you are only slowing yourself down.  It’s your choice. All calls are returned by him personally or by his lawyers, so if you want to complain that the investigation is going too slow but at the same time want a call to action for thousands of parents to call him and demand a hearing, you’re your own worst enemy.

You want to call someone?  Call the CDC Director Tom Frieden and tell him to grow a pair and fully cooperate with the OGR investigation.