I’ve started reading Deadly Choices and goodness me its a breath of fresh air in terms of factual analysis and also writing skill. The last autism book I read was Age of Autism so you’ll appreciate how great the difference is.
I’ll be blogging about Deadly Choices a fair bit I guess and I guess Sullivan will too (after all he is Bonnie Offit) and in this first blog post I want to discuss why the idea that certain illnesses are perceived (and indeed promoted) by the anti-vaccine lobby as mild and therefore of no risk – just another excuse to stick us all with another needle containing who knows what!!
The book Deadly Choices, makes this point crystal clear in the Introduction. Regarding a Hib outbreak in Minnesota:
[parents]…were afraid that vaccines contained dangerous additives, or that children received too many vaccines too soon; or that vaccines caused autism
…
…one mother reconsidered her decision: ” the doctor looked at me and said, ‘Your son is going to die, he doesn’t have much time.’ Honestly, I never really understood how severe the risk [was] that we put our son at.”
Deadly choices indeed.
And what about mumps? In 2009, an outbreak caused by an unvaccinated traveller coming back from England caused a chain reaction that infected over 1500 people in 8 months. The end result?
When it was over, mumps was found to have caused pancreatitis, meningitis, deafness, facial paralysis or inflammation of the ovaries in sixty-five people, nineteen were hospitalised.
Hib and mumps are just two of the diseases previously easily controlled by vaccines that are now becoming rampant again due to poor vaccination rates and the fact that such deadly and crippling diseases are now just a plane ride away.
This is a really misleading and just plain stupid article. I never had a mumps vaccine and never got mumps. They didn’t have Hib vaccines when I was a kid. Didn’t affect me at all.
But I DID get both Salk and Sabin polio vaccines and Diptheria-Pertussis-etc, and they caused paralytic brain stem damage that caused my Autism to become full blown. THAT is not a “mild” injury at all !!! It is a terrible life threatening injury that NEVER goes away and has severely affected my entire life.
Vaccines DO cause severe severe Autism injuries !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Here is a snippet from a previous comment by
EquiisSavant:
You can decide how much time to
devote to this discussion.
I was going to respond but after reading Sully’s discovery I don’t think I’ll bother.
EquiiSavant:
Okay, you are a data point of one. Just one. Come back and tell us the evidence when you have multiplied it by several hundred thousand as a counterpoint to several large epidemiological studies done in several countries.
Then compare them to the historical data on the injuries, disabilities and deaths caused by measles, mumps, Hib, rubella, pertussis, polio and the like. When you are done you can tell us exactly how much more of a risk a vaccine is when compared to the diseases. Like the now vaccine preventable illness that caused my son’s last very devastating seizure and left him permanently disabled.
@EquiisSavant: Alright, I think your personal experience settles the argument. The mumps vaccine doesn’t prevent mumps, because EquiisSavant never got the mumps, don’t you see?
They didn’t have HiB vaccines when I was a kid either. At age 4, meningitis nearly killed me. Two weeks in the hospital, the first week stuck in the isolation ward since they hadn’t been able to rule out Haemophilus influenzae B as the cause of my meningitis.
You can bet I vaccinated my kids against it.
Lucky you, not ever getting meningitis and thus remaining unaffected by not having been vaccinated against it. Thanks to widespread vaccination of others, you probably don’t need to worry about getting it in the future either. Lucky you.