Generation Rescue To Change.gov on Autism and Healthcare

Managing Editor's Note:  Kelli Ann has kindly supplied all the info you need to vote if you'll please scroll through the post. If you have your own change.gov letter, please run the link to it in our comments so readers can consider voting for it too. I know many of our readers are actively engaged in the process. Thanks. KS

By Kelli Ann Davis

Vote to Promote Change in 2009

Yesterday morning, I received an e-mail from John Podesta at “Change.gov: The Office of the President-Elect” encouraging me to join with others in submitting and/or voting on questions I thought important for the Transition Team to address: “We recently launched a new feature on Change.gov called Open for Questions. Thousands of you responded, asking 10,000 questions and voting nearly a million times on questions from others. Now that we've answered some of the most popular ones from the last round, we are open for questions again. Ask whatever you like, and vote up or down on the other questions to let us know which ones you most want the Transition to answer.”

The latest outreach project “Open for Questions: Round Two” follows closely behind two other initiatives undertaken in recent weeks by President-Elect Obama – “Your Seat at the Table” and “Health Care Community Discussions” (HERE).  Apparently, his administration is moving towards greater transparency and public involvement and evidently it is working; twenty-seven hours later, 39,000 questions have been submitted and 2,000,000 votes have been cast!

Recently, Generation Rescue hand-delivered the following document to the Transition Team (Read it HERE) outlining our high priority issues for autism.  We also requested a formal meeting with the new administration in order to discuss the key issues in detail. 

In an effort to ensure this meeting takes place and as follow up to our initial contact with the Transition Team, I’m asking the community to join us in our advocacy work by voting to make the following question a top contender during “Open for Questions: Round Two” segment for public input:
 
"Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey were named 2008 Couple of the Year (HERE) due to their advocacy work for Generation Rescue.  Why hasn't the Transition Team made autism a top priority and sat down with the leaders of this organization?"
 
To Vote:

• Click HERE
• Click “Sign In” to create new account
• In the search box type in “Generation Rescue”
• Click on the check mark next to the question

Remember, every vote counts!  The top twenty questions range from 10,000 votes to 1,600 votes so it won’t take much to get our question within this range!

Also, please vote as soon as you can – I don’t know when they will close the polls.

Thanks for your help and I will keep the community updated on any further developments.

Kelli Ann Davis is the D.C. Political Liaison for Generation Rescue.  Special thanks to Rescue Angel Julie Obradovic for her help on the document.

Comments

[Dawn]

I found this comment on the site....
Dawn

"The blog site, scienceblog.com, has requested that their members "crash" comments relating to a autism and links to vaccines, review of the CDC vaccine schedule , bio-medical treatment, and unbiased safety studies. Will you exclude these "no" votes?"
Garry C., Spring Hill, FL


- Health Care

[Garry]

If you search on "autism", there are currently 330 comments. I'm amazed at the duplicate comments. It appears that the Paul Offit types, vaccine manufacturers and federal government bureaucrats are out in force and voting “no” to any comments dealing with vaccines safety and federal health agency incompetence. These people are just plain evil. To counter this malicious attempt to skew the vote, we in the autism community need to get out the vote. Please contact friends, family members and other autism community members and request that they go to the change.gov website, become a member, search on autism, review each comment and vote appropriately in support of the autism community.

[Twyla]

Hey, everyone -
This is really important, and easy. You have a chance to let your voice be heard. Go to http://change.gov/page/content/openforquestions20081229/ and:
- ask questions of the Obama administration, and
- vote for questions that you feel are important.

Thousands of questions have been asked, but only a few are about autism, and only a few people have voted on these autism questions.

It's easy to sign in - no personal info required - just your email address (which of course is not published), whatever name you want to use, and your state.

To vote on questions, do a search for "autism" and one on "vaccines" and vote for whatever you agree with. And, of course, do a search for "generation rescue" and vote for Kelli Ann's question.

Let's not be outvoted by those on the other side!

[Kub Marshman]

Call me paranoid, but it seems as though most of the questions that include the words "autism and vaccine safety" together within a given question have just about the same amount of people who don't like the question as those who did. I just don't get it.

[Kristin]

All of the "no" votes really surprised me--even though it shouldn't have. I really don't understand why they have a "no" option in the first place. Maybe we can request that "no" votes not be counted. After all they can't really believe any normal person would be against vaccine safety or research into causes of autism. There has to be a way around this.

[Craig Willoughby]

I would like to make a suggestion. What may be a good idea is to create a mailing list for things like this. That way, important information like this can be sent to people registered on the mailing list. It could help to prevent the anti-child idiots from blocking our efforts to help our children. The usual Vaccinites of the Church of the Immaculate Vaccination are doing everything in their power to crash this poll. They are such snivelling cowards that they don't even want us to have a voice.

Isn't it funny that they always run to this site to get information so they can spew their hate-filled anti-child agenda. I wish there were a way to block those morons permanently and prevent them from even accessing this site.

[Ben's Dad]

The rate at which over a hundred no votes appeared between last night and lunchtime today suggests some organized evil voting going on. I would love to see where the campaign is coming from. Other no votes have me scratching my head also, including a bunch against a question on housing. I am fascinated that people would take the time to vote against asking the admin to answer the question of whether or not there is an autism epidemic. The default answer of no applies, but I have yet to hear that someone has actually tried to study this even in living age brackets. Take out the 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 census data, poll a sample from each and publish the number. Many of the 1970 folks will still be living, and if the excuse is better diagnosis, then rates should be level across all of these living census groups who have access to current diagnosis standards.

[Kelli Ann Davis -- Strategy Backfired!]

After this posted on AoA, I scrolled through the entire list of questions under "autism" (about 95) so I could do some mass voting. When I got to the end, I noticed MY question was *gone*?!! But, if I typed "generation rescue" in the search box per my directions, it still popped up!!

Lo and behold seems *someone* had flagged it as inappropriate (Surprise, Surprise -- Gomer Pyle style) -- like *that* is going to somehow stop us???

Here's the silver lining -- not only is my question back with all the other questions under "autism", the "flag as inappropriate" option is GONE and obviously someone had to READ my question to make the determination that it was legitimate.

Bottom Line: The lengths to which some people will go to try and *shut* others up is unbelievable.

[Katherine Walker]

I got the same e-mail from Podesta. I see this as a great way for our community to keep the noise level WAY UP on our issues.

It's easy to get on and vote, and I've done that for Kelli's and more.

I also POSTED one. It is very specific about the Combating Autism Act and upholding the legislative intent of vaccine safety and biomedical. Please search for mine and vote too!!

We can use these tools to move our issues forward -- it is ALL UP TO US!!!

SO GO VOTE!

[Terri Lewis]

I voted, but we haven't begun to show our numbers yet. . .at least not on this one particular question.

It would be great to show how many of us there are.

Terri

[Allison]

I, as well, posted a question yesterday before I saw this. I'm glad to find out you can vote for many. Here's mine and I already voted for yours Kelli Ann-Allison

"Are you willing to end the amount of heavy metals and toxins our children are exposed to causing a huge rise in child neurobiological disorders, by banning mercury in all vaccines, lead in toys, envir. pollution and endocrine disrupting pesticides?"

[Ben's Dad]

great fact letter

I'm in - I also added one -

"Will you dignify the struggle faced by over a million individuals and 30,000 new families a year by answering: Is there an autism epidemic? Is autism a global crisis?"
Ben's Dad, NJ

[Kelli Ann Davis To Maurine]

Maurine:

Thanks for the vote. If you place your cursor on the bars (without clicking it) the total number of votes will appear.

Hope that helps.

Best,

Kelli

[Jena]

If you want to see how many votes a question has, you can hold your cursor over the voting bar (both for and against).

[Garbo]

I just voted for this and for almost EVERY question that had to do with autism. It only takes a few minutes to go through them. I also posted my own, about getting pharma out of the FDA, HHS, CDC and NIH, which is here:
http://change.gov/page/content/openforquestions_20081217_private_url

[Maurine Meleck]

I just did this and voted. Hwever, it gives no indication of how many total votes there are or does it and I missed it?
Thanks, maurine

[Jena]

Here's the question I posted earlier.

"Will President-Elect Obama support independent research into vaccine safety and the role vaccines play in contributing toward autism and other neurodevelopmental disabilities?"

Please consider voting for it as well as you can vote for several different questions.

You can actually search autism and vaccine and several questions come up. I think the more votes they see for any of these, the more likely they are to see this as an important issue. Thanks!