We are a group of citizens who are disturbed by the increasingly failing health of those in our society. Among us are those who have been injured by the medical industry, those with children or loved ones who have been harmed and killed by the medical industry, medical professionals who are upset with what is happening in their field and those who endeavor to preserve human health in spite of increasingly corrupt and failing medical establishment.
In 2010, a group of parents of children who were suffering from neurological and autoimmune disorders, and who had been active for years in their efforts to get mainstream medicine to address the causes of, and find treatments for, their children’s poor health, faced the realization that while they had been earnest in their engagement of both the private medical industry and government public health officials, the medical establishment was not working in good faith with them. They decided that if anything was to be done about the epidemic levels of childhood chronic illness in the US, it would have to be a result of real political pressure to clean up the corruption in the medical establishment that was allowing bad pharmaceuticals, bad medical practices and bad public health policy to assault human health on such a wide scale.
They began talking with those injured by medicine in other ways, those concerned with parental rights, with lack of choices in health care options, with environmental pollution, with nutrition, and with the encroachment of the medical industrial complex on the basic rights of the individual to practice informed consent in medical care.
In the spring of 2011, it became clear that waiting to do something was no longer an option. It was time to launch The Canary Party, because the medical establishment is not paying attention to the sick canaries in our society that are telling us that there are serious problems that need to be addressed, and that if they are not, we must expect that society will begin to suffer greater and greater collapse as more and more people succumb to the diseases and disorders rampant today.
It was time to stop asking the medical establishment to pay attention to the epidemic of illness, and demand that they do, or replace them with their betters who would.
And so The Canary Party was born.
Our Executive Committee:
Mark Blaxill – Chairman
Mark Blaxill is the father of a daughter diagnosed with autism, Editor-at-Large for Age of Autism, a former director of SafeMinds and a frequent speaker at autism conferences. He writes often on autism, science and public policy issues for Age of Autism and has published a number of articles, letters and commentaries on autism in journals such as Public Health Reports, the International Journal of Toxicology, the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Neurotoxicology and Medical Hypotheses. He has also been invited to peer review articles in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Journal of Epidemiology, Pediatrics and the International Journal of Toxicology. As part of his advocacy work, he has testified before the Immunization Safety Review of the Institute of Medicine (2001), served on a Blue Ribbon Panel on Vaccine Safety (2004), initiated a symposium sponsored by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences entitled “Environmental Factors in Neurodevelopmental Disorders” (2005) and a workshop sponsored by the Institute of Medicine entitled “Autism and the Environment: Challenges and Opportunities for Research” (2007). He was a panelist at a “Meeting on Evaluating Reasons for ASD Trends” co-sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Autism Speaks (2011).
He received a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School. In his professional career, he spent 25 years at The Boston Consulting Group, where he was a Senior Vice President. Recently, he co-founded 3LP Advisors, an advisory firm focused on intellectual property transactions, where he is a Managing Partner. He has published a business book, The Invisible Edge: Taking Your Strategy to the Next Level Using Intellectual Property (Portfolio, March 2009) and has recently co-authored a book on autism, called The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine and a Man-made Epidemic, (Thomas Dunne, September 2010).
Jennifer Larson – President
Jennifer Larson is the mother of 13 year old with regressive autism and President of the Canary Party. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota with degrees in marketing, psychology and speech communication and a graduate of the OPM program of Harvard Business School. Jennifer is the owner and CEO Vibrant Technologies, incorporated 1998. She is also the owner, founder and CEO of the Holland Autism Center and Clinic, the Founding Board Chair of Children with Autism Deserve Education (CADE), a co-founder of the Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota, and a member of the Minnesota Autism Advocacy Coalition and founder and Director of the 501c3 Health Choice. As a very active republican, Jennifer was a Ron Paul delegate for MN to the 2012 RNC, is on the MN Congressional District 3 executive committee, is a 2014 State Central Delegate, is on the MN Senate District 33 executive committee and the MN Judicial 4 executive committee. Jennifer has been honored with several business and media awards during her career.
Patti Carroll – Executive Director
Patti Carroll is a parent of two beautiful children, one of whom was permanently brain-damaged by his “Well Baby” vaccines. She is an outspoken advocate for vaccine safety and informed consent, and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Canary Party. In addition, Patti is a Consumer Safety Advocate and board member of the Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota, and a Rescue Angel (parent mentor) for Generation Rescue. Her son’s vaccine injury claim has been languishing in the so-called “swift” National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program for nearly a decade, and she has interviewed over two dozen families that were compensated through the NVICP for their childrens’ lifelong vaccine-induced brain damage.
Katie Weisman – Senior Executive Board Member
Katie Weisman is the mother of 15 year-old identical triplet boys, who all have autism as a result of thimerosal poisoning. They are fantastic kids and she is very proud of them. She has spent the last 12 years, since their diagnosis, working to help them recover and to prevent other children from being affected.
Katie is socially liberal but fiscally conservative, with Midwestern roots. She is libertarian on all issues related to health – the most basic human right is the right to decide what happens to your own body or that of your child. She started off co-chairing a parent support group and a SEPTO, doing disability awareness workshops in elementary schools, and developing a safety program for autism with local police. More recently, she has been involved in
Currently, Katie serves as an Executive Board Member for the Canary Party. She is also on the Board of Directors of SafeMinds and serves on their communications, environmental and government affairs committees. She is also an 18 year member of the PEO Sisterhood.
Katie has an International Baccalaureate from