A new opinion piece by contributor Art Caplan on NBC News:
California has decided one large epidemic scare is enough. After the frightening outbreak of measles that started at Disneyland and sickened 147 people, Californians rejected the irrationality of anti-vaccine zealots and decided to restrict parents’ ability to exempt their children from school vaccinations.
The new law signed by Governor Jerry Brown throws out religious and philosophical reasons to exempt. Only health concerns will be permitted and those must be verified by a physician. If you simply don’t want to vaccinate your kids, you will have to home school.
The new law is all to the good. No major religions have heartburn over vaccination. Most see it as an obligation in order to help the community. And philosophical exemptions were nothing but an open door for those who are ill-informed, addicted to misinformation on the internet or just plain selfish. […]
Read the full article here.
It seems very odd that although a senior CDC scientist, William Thompson, recently stated that he and colleagues altered data in a study that would have shown a link between the MMR and autism in African American boys, we still trust studies that show “no link” of any vaccine to any neurological disorder without considering the likelihood that many of those studies might have been designed to cover up evidence. Some nitpick that the data eliminated in the Thompson study wouldn’t have changed anything but that’s not the point: the point is that Dr. Thompson and colleagues believed that the data in fact did demonstrate a link, and they worked to remove it.
This reminds me of the often-referenced 2001 paper in Pediatrics that showed that doses of ethylmercury children received in the 1990s were generally within limits– if you averaged the doses over six months. Is that really how we determine whether a safe dose was had– average it over six months? In reality children received doses of ethylmercury many times above any safe level in a single vaccination session– and still do if they receive some multidose flu vaccines.
We’re told that symptoms of neurological damage after vaccination are just coincidental, yet I’ve never seen any evidence that the onset of symptoms and the timing of vaccination is a purely random distribution. Where’s the proof?