Recently,
on the street of a nearby town, my wife encountered a man who was
passing out postcard-sized “Vaccine Fact Sheets” on which are
gathered statements about the alleged dangers and uselessness of
giving vaccines to prevent various childhood and adult diseases.
After surveying one his cards, she quietly asked him, “Have you
ever seen a child with diphtheria, or a man with lockjaw?
To
her alarm, the man exploded with rage. “You don't need those
vaccines!”, he shouted. She quickly moved on, but his shouts
followed her down the street. She brought the card home; it bears the
name of VacLib.com/AvatarProducts.com. It cites articles by a number
of people, some with MD, DO, DC, JD, or PhD after the name, and
“facts you should know.” It quotes half-truths and some
statements that are just plain false, which I would sum up as
dangerous rubbish.
The
reason I say that is, my wife and I have seen children die with the
diseases those vaccines prevent. We worked fifteen years in the
hinterlands of South East Asia. We are among the last people in the
world to see smallpox in the wild, when an epidemic broke out in a
village which the Burmese government vaccinator had not yet reached,
back in 1961. We have seen diphtheria close the throat of a child,
who survived only because of an emergency operation to open her
windpipe. I watched a ten-year-old girl die of whooping cough
(pertussis). I have watched one adult and several infants die of
lockjaw (tetanus) when they reached the hospital too late for
antitoxin to take effect. Before polio vaccine was developed, the
city of Syracuse NY (where I went to med school) had a hospital for
polio patients, some of them destined for life in an “iron lung”
machine. A measles epidemic wiped out forty children in a group of
villages in the mountains in Thailand. It's small comfort for their
parents to know that at least their children didn't get a vaccine
reaction. Too bad they didn't get the vaccine either.
Diptheria,
pertussis, tetanus, measles still happen still happen to children and
adults in the United States. Get yourself and your children
immunized. If you don't like the doctor's fee, get it done at Public
Health. Only the ignorant or the misinformed refuse.
