The L.A. Times: Wrong on Vaccination

Over the weekend I came a across a laughable editorial in the L.A. Times parroting some common establishment talking points in support of compulsory vaccination. Readers of this blog will be familiar with them since they are trotted out on a regular basis by the vaccine extremists and public health fanatics that seem to have open access to the editorial pages of the nations mainstream media. This particular writer, a Nina Shapiro, a professor at UCLA's Geffen School of Medicine, incorporates a number of shop-worn distortions into her piece attacking vaccine exemptions. She claims illnesses that almost never kill are life-threatening in their nature, suggests that in some schools 80% of the children are unvaccinated and implies that if we're not good little boys and girls, polio is going to come back and get us.

I responded to Ms. Shapiro's nonsense with this comment:

Let me educate you on some facts “doctor.” The measles is not a life-threatening illness. Measles almost never kills. And when it does it is due to a combination of the virus and mitigating factors such as poor nutrition. Pertussis is also almost never a killer. With between 500,000 and one million cases each year only about twenty deaths occur. Sweden abandoned the whole-cell vaccine for 17 years and deaths were apparently so minimal the literature makes no mention of them. So please spare us your wild-eyed hyperbole.

It is no surprise far-left extremists such as those running the LA Times would publish a call to take away a parents right to make medical decisions and hand it over to the state and the public health crazies whose very existence depends on America’s insane vaccination policy

Your “goal” of “protecting children” from mild illnesses by forcing parents to make those children endure a series of painful, risky and never-ending unwanted vaccinations is an idea incompatible with the concepts of liberty upon which this nation was founded. A moral government’s only role is to defends rights – not save lives, decide how much soda we can drink or decide where and when fast-food restaurants can be built. With their rights secure, individuals are perfectly capable of protecting their own children without the heavy hand of government compulsion guiding their every decision. 

What they need protection from is statists and the out-of-control vaccine schedule they propagate

Rather than attack exemptions, we should abolish them altogether and let parents, not self-serving bureaucrats and vaccine shills, decide what is right for their children.

Additionally your claims about unvaccinated children are highly deceptive since even one missed vaccine out of the countless ones that populate the schedule can place a child in your unvaccinated category. Your implication that 80% of children in some schools fall into this category are ludicrous and you should be ashamed for making it.

And where did polio kill millions. Certainly not in the Western world. Even in the worst years it killed perhaps 3,000 with a peak of 6,000 in 1916. And polio was in great measure the result of an out-of-control medical system that indiscriminately removed the tonsils of almost every child of that era. Perhaps you unaware of the fact that the tonsils are part of the immune system and their removal greatly increases the risk of polio. Injections as a result of vaccination also predisposed children to paralytic polio.

Cases were down almost 50% before the vaccine was widely used and they fell further as a result of the disease being reclassified. Additionally much of the nation’s milk supply was contaminated by DDT, a potent immune suppressant, during polio's peak era: the late 40's and early 50's . Polio emerged in epidemic form from nowhere in the late 1800's due to factors too numerous to describe here, and with conditions wildly different today, it is abject speculation to say polio would be today what it was 60 years ago - vaccine or not.