National Children’s Study Vanguard Study

Dear Readers,

The other day we got a letter in the mail informing us that we might be invited to join the National Children’s Study Vanguard Study. The next day we got another letter telling us the exact same thing. Then this past Thursday while I was at work a lady, Fran, came to the door and talked with my wife for about 10 minutes on the doorstep about participating in the Study. Fran set an appointment to come to our house yesterday, Friday, to talk with us more about joining the Study and to get us to sign the consent form.

So, we sat through the hour-long visit with Fran, the nice lady from the government.

We had never heard of the Study before, but now I know enough about it to know that I don’t want to do it. The Study has good intentions, for sure, the well-being of children, but if you follow the money trail to see who’s funding the Study, you’ll see that it’s the usual boondoggly suspects: the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Gosh, the EPA. Those are the guys that want to regulate CO2- the stuff we exhale every moment of our lives- even though Cap and Trade didn’t pass, and global warming is a hoax.

This Study has been in the works for 10 years, and they’re just starting to select children to follow. But the children they want to follow aren’t even born yet. So first they have to wait for the children to be born, and then they have to follow them to see how healthy they are for, get this, 21 years!

But wait, there’s more! Right now they’re just doing the pilot program, in which they will follow 5,000 children. The pilot program will be followed by the main program which will include 100,000 test subjects. So, all in all, I wouldn’t be surprised if this Study took about 50 years to complete. But once the Study is complete, Fran assures us, we will have more information about why some children get diabetes, ADHD, autism, etc., and other children do not. They want to find out if there’s something in the air or the water or the food that’s making more children sick. Once they find out the culprit to our children’s sicknesses, I’m sure they’ll designate a commission to ban construction materials and put more warning labels on household products.

So, in my opinion, the National Children’s Study is part of our socialist-leaning government’s pipe dream of ridding America of health inequality once and for all through top-down, command and control policies. The Study is also one more way to feed the infestation of bureaucracies in our federal government. Think of all the people with good salaries and benefits who are working on this Study.

And to think that the lady who brought news of the Study to my home, Fran, used to be such a nice woman. Alas. Her spirit has left her. Now she is another one of Obama's unmanned drones.

Fran asked us a lot of questions about our race and income level, and that kind of bothered me. I don’t like the government dividing us by race, which is why I gave a smart-aleck response to the race question on my 2010 Census questionnaire.

Right now on my desk is the glossy covered booklet with the title, “Informed Consent Form – Non-Pregnant Women, OMB Control Number: 0925-0593 v 20101109”

Now, I know that if my wife and unborn child did not participate in the study, they would just find somebody else to do it. But as my father likes to say, two wrongs don’t make a right. State governments find themselves in the same predicaments. If they don’t accept federal funds, the federal government won’t say, "Oh, well, if conservative Utah doesn’t want to funds, we’ll just re-allocate those funds to paying of the national debt." No, the federal government will just give the money to liberal California.

So, my wife and I decided not to do the study, even though we would get 25 bucks every time people from the Study came to visit.

On a brighter note, the weather is nice today and I'm headed to the temple. I really am a happy person, most of the time. It's just frustrating to see the inefficiency of the government so up-close and personal.

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa