Posted on 11/14/2009 5:40:52 AM PST by mlizzy
Leading physician, Dr. Larry Palevsky, offers compelling, scientific justification to challenge the status quo on childhood vaccinations.
btt
They’re both nuts.
Neither are old enough to have lived through a time when diseases like polio and whooping cough were prevalent and killing children. When I was in school, I saw at lease 2 friends paralyzed with polio and many classmates dead from the annual whooping cough season every year that swept through class rooms.
Besides these killers, we also had measles, German measles, chicken pox, mumps and the usual influenzas.
Childhood vaccines save far more people than they ever harm.
Sorry, but this guy’s got his head way up a part of his anatomy where the sun don’t shine.
Like many intelligent folk, he takes a reasonable argument and extends it way too far.
It is the case that improved sanitation, public health measures and the like were major factors - in some cases THE major factor - in the elimination of numerous infection diseases. But large scale, largely complete control of most of those diseases still requires widespread immunization.
Case in point - polio. I was a kid in the mid-50’s when the Salk vaccine came on line. In the early ‘50’s public sanitation was well-established, and had been for most of the century - yet there were still tens of thousands (in some years 40 or 50 thousand) cases of polio annually.
Kids on my block in Chicago developed polio, and they enjoyed first rate diets and excellent sanitation. Nowadays, polio is so rare most people don’t even know what an iron lung is.
Various sub-populations that eschew vaccination (some Mennonites, as an example) experience periodic outbreaks of polio. The rest of us don’t.
I’m happy to agree that vaccination policy might need some modification, mostly around the edges - but to contend widespread immunization is harmful is, in my mind, total folly.
And by the way, how does one distinguish a “leading physician” from your average, everyday, garden-variety physician?
Back in the late 70’s or 80’s a college for Christian Scientists, who don’t/didn’t believe in vaccinations for their children. had an outbreak of either measles or mumps. About 5 to 6 students died and many very sick. All those kids together without innoculations was just asking for it.
Was that perhaps The Principia? A buddy of mine from grad school went there as an undergrad.
That actually sounds very reasonable - some docs get way too dependent on a prescription approach to health, and making good use of the best of both a preventive and therapeutic approach to diseases makes good sense to me.
I mainly try to avoid docs althogether, though, so maybe my view on them isn’t all that valuable!
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