Who is Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and what does he have to do with Vaccines???

Who is Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), co-sponsor of Senate Bill 3?

According to the Center for Justice and Democracy, these are some facts about Senator Bill Frist, MD:

. The basis of the Frist family fortune is the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), the largest for-profit hospital chain in the country, which was founded by Frist's father and brother.

. Frist and his wife have $26 million in HCA stock in a so-called "blind trust."

. HCA has agreed to pay the federal government more than $1.7 billion in civil and criminal penalties, the largest health care settlement in history, for massive Medicare, Medicaid and Tricare billing fraud.

. Frist has gotten more than $2.3 million from doctors, health insurers, drug companies and others in the health care industry, roughly 20 percent of all the contributions to his two Senate races, raising more cash from health-care interests than 98 percent of his colleagues.

. Frist has voted against patients' rights to sue their HMOs for failure to provide adequate treatment while supporting tax subsidies to HMOs and insurance companies to offer prescription drugs to seniors, rather than providing them through Medicare. Frist has received $123,750 in campaign cash from HMOS.

. To date, Frist has received $265,023 from the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry was also the largest single contributor to the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee that Frist chaired, giving about $4 million - and Lilly was the single biggest contributor to the GOP from that industry, having given $1.6 million in the last election cycle.

. In 2002, Frist engineered the insertion of a provision into the Homeland Security bill that would protect Eli Lilly and other pharmaceutical giants from lawsuits over mercury in vaccines. Not long after Frist introduced the legislation, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the drug industry's trade group, gave $10,000 to his political action committee.

This report from: http://www.centerjd.org/free/mythbusters-free/Frist.pdf

Side Bar 4: Senate Bill 3 - What It Could Do

Of major concern to vaccine safety and civil rights advocates are the following provisions in Senate Bill 3:

* Eliminates a state's right to more strictly regulate vaccines and drugs and more fully inform their citizens about vaccine and drug risks than does the federal government. Laws already passed in California and Iowa limiting mercury content in vaccines would be repealed.

* Gives comprehensive liability protections to drug companies. Eliminates a citizen's right to seek justice in state courts for drug and vaccine injuries and deaths and limits awards in federal courts. Gives tax credits,grants and patent extensions to the drug industry.

*Allows the Department of Health and Department of Justice, the defendants in the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, to write the terms of their own defense in order to further limit awards to vaccine injured children.

* Creates and funds a mandatory, national electronic tracking system operated by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to monitor vital records of citizens relating to both notifiable and non-notifiable diseases and "new trends" and "patterns in public health." Creates penalties for states and health care providers not reporting in a "timely manner" to the national tracking system. There are no provisions for mandatory reporting of serious health problems following vaccine and prescription drug use or punishments for not reporting serious side effects.

S. 3 is being promoted by sponsors as a military veteran benefit bill because it raises the death benefits and other financial support for the families of soldiers who lost their lives in the war in Iraq.

From the National Vaccine Information Center's website. For a point by point examination of the bill, visit the site at
http://www.nvic.org/ActionAlerts/S3Article.htm .

For the actual bill: Senate Bill 3:
http://www.nomercury.org/science/documents/S_3_War_on_Terror_Act_20...
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