This article about how anti-vaccine activists try to use liability insurance policies to make money and target people was written by Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, Professor of Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law (San Francisco, CA), who is a frequent contributor to this and many other blogs, providing in-depth, and intellectually stimulating, articles about vaccines, medical issues, social policy, and the law.
Professor Reiss writes extensively in law journals about the social and legal policies of vaccination. Additionally, Reiss is also a member of the Parent Advisory Board of Voices for Vaccines, a parent-led organization that supports and advocates for on-time vaccination and the reduction of vaccine-preventable diseases. She is also a member of the Vaccines Working Group on Ethics and Policy.
An anti-vaccine activist tried to get my liability insurance policy to target me using the latest fake paper-terrorism effort that resulted from the marriage between anti-vaccine activists and sovereign citizens. Finding out I don’t have one, he, on learning my school has a liability insurance policy, decided that provides him with a double opportunity: revenge (for imaginary harms) and windfall. The problem is that it does not work like that. Liability insurance policies don’t really provide anti-vaccine sovereign citizens to make a windfall by attacking pro-vaccine advocates.
This kind of behavior, however, lends support to calls to put in place laws to combat paper terrorism, the sovereign citizen tactic of filing baseless legal claims to harass and distract, like the laws put in place to combat the related sovereign citizens’ practice of filing liens to harass people.
My hope with this post is to give people an introduction to some tactics sovereign citizens use to target people and provide them with an explanation of why these tactics are invalid. Given the growing merger between anti-vaccine activists and sovereign citizens, I think this could be useful.
This post proceeds in four parts. In the first part, I will provide a bit of background on my experience with the current harasser, self-appointed Pastor Ricardo Beas, which I think is important to understand his latest effort. Then, I will describe paper terrorism and the recently combined anti-public-health and sovereign citizen effort to use bonds. Finally, I will describe Mr. Beas’ latest foible and why it is unfounded. Finally, I will offer some guidance to other people targeted.
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