Two physicians debate whether vaccines are safe or not on CNN.

If the statement below is true, California is headed toward more outbreaks of vaccine-preventable illnesses and hence, increased and unnecessary hospitalizations and even deaths.

“We have schools in California where the percent of children who exercise the personal belief exemption is well above 50%,” said Dr. Gil Chavez, deputy director of the California Department of Public Health’s Center for Infectious Diseases. “That’s going to be a challenge for any disease that is vaccine preventable.”

If you are a physician, you may be treating infectious diseases occurring that you learned about in textbooks but have never seen first-hand.

Read the article in the Los Angeles Times.

Science Based Medicine has just published a summary of the anti-vaccine movement and the heavy costs to children and public health. The article begins when the British medical journal The Lancet irresponsibly published an obviously statistically-flawed “study” by Andrew Wakefield in 1998 that claimed that the MMR vaccine “caused” autism in children. A new “reanalysis” of a CDC study that concluded this was not the case repeats Wakefield’s methodological errors of inferring statistical relevance using a biased sample (n=5) and claiming a CDC conspiracy.

I did vaccine safety research for 12 years for the CDC and was telling people as far back as 2002-2003 that Thimerosal was not linked to autism or any other morbidities because I had done the data analysis myself with the millions of inoculation records with which I was entrusted as a consultant. I wouldn’t lie about these findings for all the money in the world. But . . . people who have children with medical problems wanted and still want simple answers and “somebody” to blame. It is their own fault if they listened to a doctor with an agenda (Wakefield) who used too small a sample with self-selected/biased data and a celebrity with breast implants instead of real scientists. No matter what we said, these celebrities and know-nothings easily convinced thousands of gullible parents that we were falsifying data, lying, conspiring, whatever they could to not have to look at the science. Now our society is reaping the price of self-inflicted ignorance: measles outbreaks are back and folks, this is just the beginning. For those who are anti-vaccine, I hope you can live with yourselves if your child is a carrier of a microbe that ends up killing somebody else’s children or if your child dies as the result of not being vaccinated. The reason why millions of people are alive today is that they would have died years ago without vaccines – that’s why they were developed in the first place. And for the ones who say they are healthy and unvaccinated, please Google the word “herd immunity” and what happens when herd immunity is breached. p.s. I don’t own stock in any pharma company and never have, so I’m not “bought.”

http://www.upworthy.com/it-took-studying-25782500-kids-to-begin-to-undo-the-damage-caused-by-1-doctor?c=ufb2