New York State Assembly Introduces Bill Mandating COVID-19 Vaccine

New Yorkers will no longer get to decide if they will receive a COVID-19 vaccine if a bill calling for a mandatory vaccine gets approved. New York State Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat who represents New York’s 67th Assembly District, quietly introduced a bill on Dec. 4 that would require “COVID-19 vaccine to be administered in accordance with the department of health’s COVID-19 vaccination administration program and mandates vaccination in certain situations.” Every New Yorker, except those medically exempt, are required to receive the vaccine if the state’s vaccination efforts do not achieve “sufficient immunity from COVID-19.” Barbara Loe Fisher, cofounder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, described the legislation as inappropriate. “It is inappropriate for public health officials and state legislators to be introducing legislation that mandates use of an experimental vaccine being considered for release under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA),” Fisher told The Epoch Times in an email. “Until a COVID-19 vaccine is formally licensed by the FDA and recommended for use by certain populations by the CDC, it remains an experimental vaccine,” she said. “This kind of bill sends the wrong message to the public.” The National Vaccine Information Center is a nonprofit organization that publishes “information on diseases and vaccine science, policy, law and the ethical principle of informed consent.”

New York Vaccine Police State: Proposed Mandatory Gardasil Vaccine to Target Homeschoolers?

Given recent legislative actions in New York, as well as proposed new ones, to remove any exemptions to vaccines and mandate that all children must be vaccinated, the idea of New York becoming a vaccine police state is no longer a theory or warning. It is happening in full public view, thanks to what one lawmaker refers to as "the corruption in Albany." A new proposed bill in New York would mandate the HPV Gardasil vaccine as a requirement for school attendance, both private and public, including daycare. Parents who no longer can enroll their children in schools, whether public or private, due to the loss of religious and medical exemptions to vaccines, are apparently turning to homeschool education as their only option left to educate their children. But a lawmaker from Warsaw, Assemblyman David DiPietro, has stated that lawmakers are planning on outlawing homeschooling, because they want to be able to vaccinate the children in the schools, without parental approval or knowledge.

Why is NY Governor Cuomo Delaying to Sign 2 Bills with Overwhelming Bipartisan Support to Protect Families?

The N.Y. State Central Register Reform Bill seeks to protect families by raising the state’s unusually low standard of evidence for listing parents on a state abuse and neglect registry, and reducing the economic impact of being listed. In 2018, more than 47,000 cases were added to the database, which is visible to potential employers. Parents are often listed even if no court action has been taken against them and remain on the registry—regardless of the severity of the accusation against them—until their child reaches age 28. The bill would require a “preponderance of evidence,” not “some credible evidence,” to list parents, a standard in line with most other states. It would seal parents’ records on the registry after eight years, in most cases, and make it easier for parents to challenge their records before that. The other bill, the Preserving Family Bonds Act, would allow children adopted from foster care to continue to have contact with their parents if a judge agrees that it’s in the child’s best interest. Termination of parental rights has been called a “civil death penalty,” but this bill would protect family bonds by ensuring open adoption, even when it’s not possible for a child to return home. Taken together, these bills represent an important effort to reduce the punitive effect of the child welfare system. Too often, the system punishes and permanently separates poor families—especially Black and Native families—as the U.S. has done through law and through economic inequity for its entire history. The federal Adoption and Safe Families Act, passed in 1997, remains especially damaging and reflects the time’s hysteria about Black families, when media images of “super-predators,” “welfare queens,” and “crack babies” demonized Black mothers and children. The law cut the length of time parents have to reunite with their children and provided financial incentives to states to prioritize adoption. The federal government also provides nearly unlimited funds for foster care but almost none for supports that enable families to keep children safe at home.

New Law Allows Sexually Abused Foster Girl to Sue Westchester County and New York CPS – Thousands More to Follow

Health Impact News has been reporting for the past few years that Child Protection Services and the U.S. Foster Care system is the main pipeline for sexually trafficking children. This child sex trafficking problem within the child welfare system is still not widely known in the U.S., but it is well documented as fact. Now, a new law passed in the State of New York may reveal just how prevalent this problem is within New York state. The Child Victims Act is a new law passed earlier this year that allows survivors of sexual abuse to file civil suits regardless of the statute of limitations. New York attorney Samantha Breakstone says she is representing "thousands" of victims under the new law, and she filed the first one in Westchester County on September 19th. According to Rockland/Westchester Journal News: "The lawsuit accuses the Westchester County Department of Social Services and the New York State Office of Children & Family Services of covering up or allowing the sexual abuse of a young girl in foster care during the late 1990s."

Medical Kidnapping of Children Often Based on Race and Economic Class

When a child experiences a mild head injury and a parent seeks medical attention, what happens next in New York City seems to depend on the ZIP code and the color of the parent’s skin. In April, the actress Jenny Mollen, wife of the actor Jason Biggs and resident of Manhattan’s affluent West Village, announced on social media that she had accidentally dropped her 5-year-old son, causing a skull fracture and requiring treatment in the intensive care unit of a private Manhattan hospital’s I.C.U. Three months earlier and several miles north in the Bronx, my client, a Latina mom, was folding laundry in her apartment when she saw her 9-month-old daughter and 7-year-old son bump heads while playing on the bed. The following day she noticed that her daughter had a bump on her head. She took the baby to her pediatrician, and a follow-up at the hospital showed two minor skull fractures with a small underlying bleed. This is where Ms. Mollen’s and my client’s stories diverge. According to Ms. Mollen’s social media account of the incident, she and Mr. Biggs were met with compassion and sympathy by the hospital. Ms. Mollen publicly thanked the staff, saying she was “forever grateful.” At the Bronx hospital, though, my client was met with suspicion, interrogation and accusations of child abuse, even after explaining her daughter’s accidental head bump with her brother to the hospital staff. Emergency room staff members called the New York City Administration for Children’s Services to report possible child abuse.

Parents Risk Losing Children to CPS in NY if They Fail to Comply with Mandatory Vaccines

As we reported last week, on June 13, 2019, the New York legislature quickly pushed a bill (A2371) to repeal the religious exemption to vaccination through both the Assembly and Senate in one day with no public hearings. The unprecedented legislative coup, which cut the citizens of New York out of participating in the law making process, culminated in the Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo immediately signing the bill into law. Soon after this bill passed in New York, some parents apparently received letters from their children's school districts informing them of the new law, and that any child who previously had a religious exemption to vaccines now needed to comply and get caught up on their vaccinations. One of these letters, from Deer Park, New York, was posted on Facebook and quickly circulated, where James Cummings, the Assistant Superintendent for Pupil Personnel Services, let parents know that failure to comply and vaccinate their children would result in being reported to Child Protective Services (CPS). CPS workers routinely seize children from parents who do not comply with medical directives. Today, you can lose your children to CPS for simply wanting to obtain a second opinion from a different doctor for medical treatments for your children. These children are very often taken out of their homes and put into foster care, where the vast majority of them are abused. Foster care is a billion dollar industry, and it is the main source of the United States' very large, and very real, problem of child sex trafficking. We have documented these cases of "medical kidnapping" for almost 5 years now on our MedicalKidnap.com website. It would appear that State Legislators and governors imposing strict mandatory vaccination laws have now found another pipeline of putting children into this very lucrative foster care system to access federal funds, where corruption is the norm.

NY City Council Asks Why Parents are Being Accused of Child Abuse for Simply Using Marijuana

As New York considers legalizing marijuana, attention is also turning to how the drug plays a role in the city’s child welfare system—one that has the power to remove children from their parents and that investigates, almost exclusively, low-income families of color. Parents and advocates have reported that recreational marijuana use can lead to investigations of child maltreatment by the city’s Administration for Children’s Services. Many times these investigations stem from testing pregnant women and their newborns at the city’s public hospitals, according to testimony at a City Council hearing on Wednesday. Queens Councilwoman Adrienne Adams called the practice “the systemic criminalization of women of color,” which comes with the threat of separating children and parents. “We are absolutely tearing families apart, needlessly,” Adams said.

BREAKING: Rockland County NY Becomes America’s First Vaccine Police State – Bans Unvaccinated Children from Public Places – Health Dept. Goes Door to Door

Rockland County Executive Ed Day held a press conference earlier today to announce that he had declared a "state of emergency" regarding the New York state county's 153 cases of measles over a 6-month period, and placed a ban on all children under the age of 18 from appearing in any public area, which includes schools, malls and places of worship. Mr. Day said that this was the "first such effort of this kind nationally." The emergency ban is clearly targeted towards parents of unvaccinated children, as Mr. Day stated: "Parents will be held accountable if they are found to be in violation of this state of emergency act. And the focus of this effort is on the parents of these children. We are urging them once again, now with the authority of law, to get your children vaccinated." Mr. Day tried to downplay fears of police checkpoints and random checks for vaccination status, but he also stated that any parent found to be not in compliance with the emergency order would be referred to the district attorney's office for possible prosecution. "If we have a situation where it comes to our attention that a parent is willingly, knowingly, not allowing a child to be vaccinated, under the emergency order, it will be referred into the district attorney." The Rockland County Health Department, who recommended the emergency ban, has reportedly been going door to door and calling homes within the community in an effort to deal with the measles "epidemic."

“Family First Act” Has a “Presents for Pimps” Loophole to Allow Sex Trafficking to Continue in Foster Care Group Homes

It’s always cause for celebration when a place that institutionalizes children is forced to close. The residential treatment portion of Hawthorne-Cedar Knolls, an institution in Westchester County, north of New York City, is scheduled to shut down. But don’t celebrate too much. A new federal law actually makes it easier to keep such institutions going, and set up new ones. The shutdown of the residential treatment portion of Hawthorne-Cedar Knolls won’t happen because the agency that runs it, the Jewish Board Family and Children’s Services, had a crisis of conscience. It will happen because the pressure from upset neighbors and state regulators became too much. What was upsetting them? Oh, just the usual: violence and sex trafficking. Unfortunately, the new “Family First Act” comes complete with a “presents for pimps” loophole, that will encourage more tragedies like the one at Hawthorne-Cedar Knolls.

N.Y. Mother Fights for Medically Kidnapped 13 Year Old Son Being Forced to Receive Chemo Therapy Even Though He is Cancer-free

ABC7 in New York is reporting on the story of a Long Island mother who lost custody of her 13 year old son when she disagreed with doctors over his treatment. Kristin Thorne reports: "A mother on Long Island is fighting to have her son removed from chemotherapy treatment after he was given a clean bill of health by doctors. Candace Gundersen's son, Nick Gundersen, 13, is receiving court-ordered chemotherapy at NYU Winthrop Hospital in Mineola. He's now in the custody of Suffolk County Child Protective Services." Kristin Thorne also spoke with Nick from his hospital bed: "They basically took me away from my parents and that's unnecessary because they're trying to help me and they're not trying to kill me. I think that they should focus on other families that actually need help and whose children lives are actually in danger," he said.

N.Y. Times Exposes How Poor People More Likely to Lose Children to CPS

She was caught up in what lawyers and others who represent families say is a troubling and longstanding phenomenon: the power of Children’s Services to take children from their parents on the grounds that the child’s safety is at risk, even with scant evidence. The agency’s requests for removals filed in family court rose 40 percent in the first quarter of 2017, to 730 from 519, compared with the same period last year, according to figures obtained by The New York Times. In interviews, dozens of lawyers working on these cases say the removals punish parents who have few resources. Their clients are predominantly poor black and Hispanic women, they say, and the criminalization of their parenting choices has led some to nickname the practice: Jane Crow. “It takes a lot as a public defender to be shocked, but these are the kinds of cases you hear attorneys screaming about in the hall,” said Scott Hechinger, a lawyer at Brooklyn Defender Services. “There’s this judgment that these mothers don’t have the ability to make decisions about their kids, and in that, society both infantilizes them and holds them to superhuman standards. In another community, your kid’s found outside looking for you because you’re in the bathtub, it’s ‘Oh, my God’” — a story to tell later, he said. “In a poor community, it’s called endangering the welfare of your child.”

Ruling Alters Legal Landscape in NY Shaken-baby Cases

For the first time, a New York appellate court has ruled that evidence once used to convict people in shaken-baby cases may no longer be scientifically valid. The ruling, which came in the case of René Bailey, a Greece woman convicted of causing the death of a child in 2001, has implications for a number of other people in state prisons for shaken-baby offenses. In this area alone, several dozen people have been convicted of murder or assault in such cases. The appeals court decision, released Thursday, changes the legal landscape in New York for alleged shaken baby cases, said Brian Shiffrin, a local appellate lawyer who was not involved in the case. “It makes it both easier for defense attorneys to argue the science and it puts the burden back on prosecutors to show there is evidence to support the theory of shaken baby syndrome,” said Shiffrin, who has handled appeals of shaken-baby convictions.

World War II Veteran Medically Kidnapped in New York Dies in Pain on Thanksgiving Day

Laredo Regular relates the tragic ending of this World War II Veterans life: "My Grandpa, Julius Corley, officially passed away on Thanksgiving afternoon after being on life support in the prior weeks. He never got to come home." Julius' story began long before Health Impact News was contacted about his plight in the fall of 2015. Julius was a World War II Veteran being held at New York's Montefiore Hospital against his will and those of his legal and medical guardians. Julius had been medically kidnapped by Montefiore when he was transferred from their affiliate, The Laconia Nursing Home, after the family filed a complaint about the conditions there. Laredo laments, "My grandpa never got to come home. He died in pain in the Montefiore main branch. It was painful. We had hopes, but to know that he was in pain like that and passed away is awful. The entire situation played out so awfully."

Medically Kidnapped Senior in New York Hospital “Wasting Away”

Montefiore Wakefield Hospital in the Bronx, New York has allegedly refused to release Laredo Regular’s grandfather, Julius, from confinement within its walls. Has Julius Corley been a pawn in a Medicaid fraud claim? Why was Julius allowed to waste away to 135 lbs while in Montefiore Hospital when he could and would eat for his family, and when allowed to see his loved ones and those who cared about him, and could and would speak on his own behalf? Why, although the hospital claims that "sometimes dementia patients are in denial," was Mr. Corley able to speak well enough and was lucid enough for the hospital to honor his request to not have a feeding tube inserted—for over three and a half months? The family believes that someone in that hospital has a conscience, that someone there still believes that they are helping people have better lives. This is not a good life for Julius, nor anyone else who is suffering there. Speak up. Speak out!

Adult Medical Kidnapping in New York: 1950s Air Force Veteran Held Hostage in Hospital

Laredo Regular just wants to take his grandfather home, but a New York Hospital is keeping him hostage. Have we entered into a new age of "elder abuse" that includes medical kidnapping? Not happy with the medical treatment his grandfather was receiving, Laredo and his mom sought to transfer him to a different facility. They are the holder of a Health Proxy as well as POA (power of attorney) for their family member, and filled out the required forms for an AMA (or Against Medical Advice) hospital discharge. But the hospital would not discharge him, and later both Laredo and his mother were dragged out of the hospital room and banned from the hospital. The Laredo family has sought help through various legal entities—the police, attorneys, and the political system; all of whom, we are told, are in complete agreement with the family, but have not been able to get the hospital to budge from its decision to hold the grandfather against their will. How can a hospital have so much power to defy police, attorneys, and the political system?

Successful Actor and Teacher is Denied the Right to Parent His Own Children Because He Is Blind

The right of the natural parent to the care and custody of his or her child is considered a fundamental right in the United States. In spite of that, a New York Kings County Supreme Judge in Brooklyn has slammed the door on an American father’s right to parent is own children – solely it seems because he is blind. The judge, in this case, would insert “able” and in particular “sighted” in front of “natural parent.” “No vision, no children” sums up the Court’s decision, upturning decades of civil rights progress and common sense. Somehow the fact that tens of thousands of blind parents raise their children every day without “sighted supervision” was lost to the judge. Christopher G. Roberts has over 23 years of experience in professional theatre. He is the Founder and Producing Artistic Director of Steppingstone Theatre Company (SSTC), a not-for-profit arts organization. He has an MFA degree in acting from Brooklyn College and a BA degree in theater from the University at Buffalo.