Children's Health Defense leader urges Vermont to protect informed-consent rights as federal vaccine guidance shifts

Mary Holland, president and CEO of Children's Health Defense, told the House Healthcare committee on Feb. 3 that Vermont should safeguard informed consent and "health choice" in light of recent federal vaccine guidance changes and lingering safety questions.

Holland said she supports a package of bills in the Vermont House that, in her view, would protect parental choice, require reporting of adverse reactions and bar discrimination on the basis of immunization status. "I think those are all very laudable, bills that are worthy of consideration," she said.

Holland framed the issue around what she described as a national chronic-disease crisis and argued the federal vaccine policy architecture established by the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act shaped mandating practices at the state level. She told the committee that, "All vaccines are still available and all vaccines are still covered by insurance," and that some recent HHS/CDC guidance now designates certain shots as "shared clinical decision making" rather than universally recommended.

On the federal guidance change, Holland said the government now lists 11 vaccines as universally recommended and has placed others—including respiratory syncytial virus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, meningococcal, rotavirus, COVID-19 and influenza—under shared clinical decision making. "There's now been this kind of bifurcation," she said, "which creates a little bit more room to make individualized decisions."

Holland raised several safety and oversight concerns and repeatedly framed them as claims or findings her organization has pursued in litigation and research. She described limitations of clinical trials, saying many vaccine trials did not use what she termed "true inert placebos," and criticized the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) as a passive system that she said is not adequate for robust safety surveillance. "VAERS is a thoroughly inadequate system," she said.

She also described the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and said it has paid out more than $5 billion to date for a list of compensable conditions, and noted that product information from manufacturers lists similar adverse events. Holland related an example she said her organization litigated: a child she identified as "Sarah Doe," whom she said received letters from seven physicians supporting a medical exemption but was denied by a school consultant; Holland said her group won a preliminary injunction restoring the exemption and the child's school attendance.

Holland discussed pending and recent court developments, citing Miller v. McDonald and the Supreme Court's GVR (granted-vacated-remanded) action in light of Monmouth v. Taylor, and said those rulings could affect how strict-scrutiny review applies to denials of religious or parental exemptions.

Many of the claims Holland made—about the adequacy of trials, the content of some vaccine formulations, and the scale of certain state and national statistics—were presented as her organization's findings or as litigation assertions; the committee record does not contain independent verification of those claims during the hearing. Holland closed by saying the topic draws strong feelings on every side and invited questions. The committee recessed and the next witness announced was a Vermont nurse and nurse practitioner.