Shock Analysis: US More Restrictive than China and Russia on Vaccine Policy

American media consumers are constantly bombarded with horror stories of authoritarian crackdowns in foreign countries, usually to justify military action, imposition of economic sanctions, or simply to distract from problems at home. To be sure, when it comes to certain constitutional rights that the United States government explicitly may not infringe upon, specifically freedom of speech and our rights to personal self-defense, America remains exceptional when compared to other countries both in writing and in practice.

However, American citizens are largely unaware that when it comes to freedom of medical choices for themselves and their children, some surprising countries have a far healthier skepticism of government’s absolute power to enforce vaccination for children. More and more Americans are aware that the vaccine schedule that is required for many countries in Europe is less onerous for children in terms of the number of required shots. But the fact remains that many of those European countries also make exemptions to the schedule very difficult to obtain, similar to most states in the U.S.

Many would be surprised to learn that countries that are considered authoritarian (or even totalitarian) diverge from the U.S. on childhood vaccinations in far more substantial and surprising ways. Results from this Health Freedom Defense Fund (HFDF) investigation show that the U.S., a country with a proud and vocal tradition of individual liberty, founded on the principles of the Enlightenment and self-government, is now among the worst societies on earth for mandatory childhood injections and the individual right to determine what medicine or injection enters his or her body. A glance at two of the countries that most frequently receive criticism for human rights and authoritarian tendencies is quite illustrative.

Russian Federation: Clear Rights for Parents and Children, No Legal Obligation to Vaccinate

Many Americans who consume corporate news sources would be shocked to learn that one of the countries that enjoys a full right to refuse medical treatment is the Russian Federation.

Perhaps due to the recent Soviet legacy of using medicine (particularly psychiatry) as a political weapon to silence dissent, the Russian people today have fought for and secured their right to refuse vaccination for their children. It is clearly stated in Federal Law No. 157-F3, Article 5 and Article 11, that all individuals have the “right to refuse preventive vaccinations.” In article 20 of Federal Law No. 323-F3, Russian law makes it clear that this right extends to children, outlining in the legal language that in Russia:

1) All medical interventions require voluntary, freely given informed consent

2) For children, all consent is given by parents or legal representatives

3) Parents may refuse any medical intervention, including vaccination

This is stated in remarkably clear language that many in the United States would like to see in their own state or federal constitutional law on this topic. These laws have been cited in successful lawsuits in Russia, and courts have found that the law explicitly does not allow punitive or even administrative punishment for refusal of any vaccination outside of healthcare settings. During officially announced outbreaks or epidemics, there may be a temporary ban of children from schools or sanatoria (facilities for treatment of tuberculosis and other conditions) if vaccinations are not taken. But this designation is not discretionary, so a school, a local official, or an employer cannot by law decide that this temporary ban is in place, it must come from an order from the Federal Ministry of Health. This power, however, is almost never invoked. Even during the covid-19 hysteria, Russia did not require children to be vaccinated with the state-developed (non mRNA) Sputnik injection, nor bar children from school for non-vaccination.

China: More “Duty” on Parents and Administrative Pressure to Inject, But No Refusal of Schooling

Compared to Russia, there are stronger pressures brought to bear for childhood vaccinations in China today. But they still shockingly have generally less punitive measures against children and parents for refusing vaccines than America, even after recent reforms at the federal health agencies.

In China, administrative procedures are used to apply pressure to vaccinate children according to the injection schedule, including a “duty-based” approach to get a child to take the vaccine. This involves a state-mandated procedural version of informed consent, where parents cannot simply refuse vaccines in general, but must interact with government nurses or doctors as part of their “duty” or “obligation” to get to that point of being granted an exemption, discussing the issue according to a proscribed process.

Many readers will note that there are interesting parallels to the increasingly common “shared clinical decision-making” approach that the Department of Health and Human Services in the U.S. has been recommending to doctors and schools for the most controversial vaccines that have been recommended to children. This includes covid-19 mRNA injections and the Hepatitis B shot. So the very limited “good news” for American parents right now is that for only a few vaccines, the U.S. seems to be as flexible as China on childhood vaccinations, at least for now.

In a Chinese Journal of Medical Ethics¹, one researcher summarized their approach, stating that “citizens are required to complete a decision-making process but retain autonomy in their final vaccination choices.” However, in practice, the analysis also mentions that a health official upon initial refusal by a parent or guardian, “actively connects with guardians through the medical system to complete the decision-making closed loop.” As mandated by law, the school must report a child who is not compliant to the government health agencies that administer vaccines in China. This follow up pressure (and likely low-level harassment) from officials as schools report when a child is not fully compliant is no doubt unpleasant, and a special certificate must be acquired and shared with teachers, but there are no examples in our research of Chinese schools that refused to allow children to attend school because of vaccination status.

In fact, when one district did try to bar students from school briefly for not getting covid-19 injections in 2021, there was social outcry and threats of litigation, and the government quickly backtracked and noted that it was only “in principle” that people who refused vaccination should not be allowed to enter public spaces, excluding outright bans. Laudably, one Chinese lawyer (Liu Changsong, a lawyer with Beijing’s Mugong Law Firm) noted in the press that “one-size-fits-all and radical approaches are not proper. Vaccination should be voluntary, which means individual choices must be respected and any special cases given a priority.” Sadly, very few lawyers in the United States seem to have the backbone to make such a claim in public today.

The Covid-19 Era: US Avoided Totalitarian Excesses, but Quietly Institutionalized Medical Martial Law

From 2020 through 2022, despite the many horrors and abuses at the time, during the global covid-19 crackdown, the United States avoided or reversed some of the nakedly totalitarian abuses seen in European countries, China, and Australia. This was in large part thanks to the still-intact rights of free speech and armed self-defense. America avoided:

• Quarantine camps (as in Australia and China)

• Mandatory home quarantine/isolation and forced geo-tracking on smart phones (as in all European countries to various degrees)

• Freezing of bank accounts of mandate protesters (as in Canada)

While many federal government agencies, local municipalities, schools, and states in the US instituted some attempts at the above measures, they never got off the ground substantially due to legal challenges and public opposition. Mask mandates at the federal level were struck down in April 2022, thanks to a lawsuit brought by Health Freedom Defense Fund (HFDF).

But this is largely where the positive achievements stopped. Exciting wins, like HFDF’s successful lawsuit ending local school vaccine mandates in Los Angeles’ United School District for workers, were later vacated in 2025. In the words of HFDF President Leslie Manookian, “the court concluded that as long as a government official believes a vaccine will protect public health, it is irrelevant whether the vaccine actually works.” These are troubling developments.

On the national level, it was only after tens of millions of Americans reluctantly took the experimental mRNA injections, after being threatened with losing their jobs by way of expanding federal vaccine mandates for private employers, that the Supreme Court blocked most private mandates. At some level at least, the high court seemed to understand that such overreach was entirely out of line with the founding principles of American government, but it did so far too late.

While American society resisted many of the most authoritarian measures during covid-19 lockdowns in practice, it failed to do so in law. Shockingly, the fundamental legislation, the PREP Act, which enshrines near-total liability protections for any individuals and companies that implements any covid-19-related “counter-measure,” is still in place even under a new administration. The emergency declaration that keeps the PREP Act active for covid-19, is in place until mid 2030 when it is scheduled to be fully deactivated. History teaches us that emergency law, once put it place, rarely is removed by a government grown accustomed to their new powers. Numerous public officials in both parties have announced that the covid-19 emergency is “over,” the emergency use authorization has been withdrawn, and yet the emergency declaration for covid-19 persists, along with the legal protections it affords to those that harmed the public’s health or their livelihoods through their actions. In a normal, functioning society, all emergency declarations would have been canceled by now. In the American system, our constitutional law should simply never have been suspended in the first place with legislation like the PREP Act.

A Wake-Up Call to Live Up to Our Stated Principles

Amazingly, the American public and many state governments place a tremendous amount of trust in the judgment of “non-profit,” pharma-dominated trade groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which argue for zero allowance of non-medical exemptions for injections for children in the United States. Even for medical exemptions, AAP argues they should be rare, updated yearly, and only be valid for specific injections, not the entire schedule. They argue for law enforcement tools to be used against parents for incorrect vaccination form submissions, and that there should be no allowance made for parents with religious, philosophical, or evidence-based opposition to vaccination of their child. It is a sad state of affairs when the Chinese health system, or the Russian Federation, allows for more personal freedom in medical choices for children than the AAP, but this is unquestionably the case.

This research exercise by HFDF, which compares other nations’ legal and societal allowance for individuals to make their own medical choices, is obviously not an endorsement of their overall health care system or those societies in general over the United States. Rather, it is meant as a wake-up call to all Americans, as our birthright is to enjoy bodily autonomy and dignity regardless of whether or not we choose to take a particular medical product.

The breathless argument that our children will become less healthy if we have freedom to make our own health decisions is ludicrous—Russia’s under-5 child mortality rate is 45% lower than the United States’ (4.5 vs 6.5 per 100,000 births), and China’s rate is also slightly lower than American children.² In fact, Russia’s rate of childhood mortality has dropped by 75% since these legal protections have been put into place in 2002.

In California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut and Maine, doctors and schools threaten parents with loss of schooling, as well as social service investigations and even losing custody of their children for merely passing on an injection. These are not the hallmarks of a free society. In fact, we seem to be exceptional for all the wrong reasons on this issue, and the American people should demand our basic rights be restored immediately.

1. China’s Vaccination Policy Research: Balancing Public Health and Personal Autonomy Date: August 13, 2025 Source: Journal of Medical Ethics 3.4

2. https://data.unicef.org/country/rus/

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Originally posted on HealthFreedomDefense.org