American Values vs. The Scientific American

The editors of Scientific American, in coordination with the pro-vaccine propaganda emerging from the release of Paul Offit and Seth Mnookin's new books (the two authors encouraging us to both vaccinate and bow down to the will of "science") and the release of a report attacking Dr Andrew Wakefield and his study tying autism to the MMR vaccine, have, in the magazine's February issue, submitted their own bit of vaccination disinformation.

The article entitled Fear and Its Consequences begins with an incident that has nothing to do with either fear or its consequences: the California pertussis outbreak of 2010

California is now in the middle of the worst outbreak of pertussis in half a century... The number of annual cases has been climbing in recent years. Last year, though, the rate of infection rose, once again, to epidemic proportions—7,297 known and suspected cases, a fourfold increase from 2009. 

Of course, no piece of establishment generated propaganda would be complete with out a rehashing of this epidemic - even though "vaccine refusers" had as much to do with it as they did with the financial crisis of 2008.

The editors then employ a nonsensical premise in an attempt to sell us on the idea of herd immunity (they sure do love their herd immunity)

The success of any given vaccine depends on so-called herd immunity, in which a high rate of immunization in a population helps to protect those individuals who are not immune.

No the success of a vaccine depends on how well it protects those receiving it - any herd immunity is a simply a byproduct of large numbers of people choosing that vaccine - or sadly, being forced to accept it.

Continuing on with the herd immunity theme, they assert:

Herd immunity requires high immunization rates—around 95 percent for highly contagious infections like pertussis and measles. 

As to their point, I'm not sure. As I've discussed ad nauseum, 1 million cases of undiagnosed pertussis occur each year; making herd immunity to pertussis pure fiction.

The editors prattle on:

When immunization rates drop below the critical level, disease can strike not only unvaccinated individuals but also vaccinated ones, because all vaccines fail to confer immunity in a certain percentage of people.

Terrifying. Damn those anti-vaxxers! But wait rates have never reached 95% for the measles - or any other illness for that matter - even under the regime of forced immunization. So how could rates be falling below critical levels when they've never reached critical levels?

Either way, whether or not they reach critical levels is unimportant because the attainment of those levels does not justify the unwanted medication of America's children.

Next up is the endangerment card:

Parents who opt out are endangering not only their own kids but everybody else’s, too—including those who cannot be vaccinated because they are too young or immunocompromised, as well as youngsters who have received their shots.

In my opinion (and that's the only one that counts when my child is involved) the endangerment comes when you allow 70 doses of vaccine to be administered to a young child. As to the precious herd, the danger of catching an infectious illness is a product of civilization, not a result of those who choose not to vaccinate. When we're forced to vaccinate we're simply being forced to protect others by using our children as objects. Opting out of that immoral system simply returns us to a baseline at which one person is at a moderate risk of catching an illness from another person

Slogging through their list of talking points, they arrive at the Wakefield matter

In February 2010 the Lancet retracted Wakefield’s infamous paper. That leaves no scientific evidence to support the assertion that vaccines cause autism or other chronic diseases. 

They fail to inform their readers that there may be no scientific evidence because science has never seen fit to examine whether or not vaccines (not just one single vaccine or one single vaccine ingredient) cause autism - especially when these vaccines are given in countless different combinations during different stages of development.

Finally the article sinks to it's most pathetically absurd point

The right to decide what is best for oneself and one’s children ends where science has so clearly documented a threat to public welfare. It’s time for the other 48 states to eliminate these exemptions and adopt strict enforcement policies to ensure that kids get their jabs. 

Wrong! The only time the right to choose what's best for one's self comes under government control is when those choices infringe upon the rights of fellow citizens - and there is no right to be free from illness at the expense of others.

The threat to public welfare about which they speak is really a threat to people (scientists love to talk about herds and hives and communities and the collective but never people) but that threat comes not from other people violating our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happineess (the area in which government involvement and protection is legitimate). Rather these "threats" - if one could call the mumps a threat - come from a combination of infectious agents and the living conditions we, for the most part, choose ourselves.

As free people, we can discover and use vaccines, avoid people and live a life that supports health rather than illness.These, unlike forced vaccination, are legitamate ways we, the people, can protect ourselves - legitamate because we, in the process, do not trample upon the rights of others to obtain that protection.

Scientific American's disdain for freedom is hardly surprising since it and similar publications believe we all live to do as the scientists say. After all in a free country how would they expropriate the money of hard working Americans in order to fund their self indulgent little science projects. And how could they afford to traverse the world, attending their yearly global warming climate change summits - held of course in some of the world's most glamorous locations.

Who would give them the time of day were it not for their never-ending alarmism promising (without their leadership) both a world about to explode into a gigantic fireball and one a the precipice of being devoured by the scourge of infectious illness.

It's revealing that, in the very same issue in which this little editorial appears, two other articles call for the implementation of policys that would, to solve the crises de jour, tell us what to drive, the temperatures at which we'd be allowed to maintain our homes and of course what foods and beverages we'd be permitted to consume. No aspect of our lives is safe from the scientist and his political enablers.

Scientists are, even though they're loath to admit it, people like the rest of us. And as such they desire power, prestige and the ability to foist their political agendas upon others.

They labor under the delusion that "science" confers to them some legitimate authority to rule and control - just as the kings of yesteryear imagined their authority flowed from a divine source.

In light of the dangers science poses to freedom, it is time emulate the founding fathers' separation of church and state and, as the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend suggested, separate state and science.

Release the Parrots!

Over the past several weeks a torrent of pro-vaccination misinformation has been unleashed upon the nation. Most of it parrots a variety of talking points concocted by vaccine idolaters Paul Offit and Seth Mnookin

Michigan's Kalamazoo Gazette begins the talking point parade with these two:

A growing number of parents are refusing to immunize their children

And:

...diseases thought long gone are making a comeback.

But vaccination rates are at all time highs. The small rise in exemptions (from say perhaps .05% to .2%) is negated by rises among the general population. After all you wouldn't say, after losing a five dollar bill but then finding a ten dollar one, that you had a net loss of five dollars  - would you?

As to the second point, throughout the entire vaccine era there have been small outbreaks of vaccine-preventable illnesses yet the author would have us believe it was 1950 and every child was contracting the measles, mumps and chicken pox

The Gazette then rolls out the obligatory pediatrician and public health official. First we're then treated to the lamentations of Pediatrician Eric Slosberg regarding the reluctance of some parents to do as their told and vaccinate:

“It’s very frustrating; to be frank, it’s like talking to a brick wall,”

We'll Eric there's a flipside to that. I'm very frustrated that you and your public health comrades can't take no for an answer and leave parents alone. It's kind of like talking to a brick wall. Some people don't want vaccines; get over it.

A Dr. Allan Lareau, of Bronson Rambling Road Pediatrics, in Kalamazoo then weighs in:

“Based on all available literature, evidence and current studies, there is no evidence to support that vaccines cause autism or other developmental disabilities,” Lareau said. “It’s way beyond a reasonable doubt at this point — vaccines are not a cause of autism.”

Sadly Dr. Lareau, like so many birds of a feather in the medical community, wants us to believe an absence of evidence due to a lack of investigation is the equivalent of a rigorous investigation of a possible link that turns up no association

Finally, in a point that seems to contradict the entire article - that people fleeing vaccination in droves - we discover:

Statewide, only about 4 percent of all children did not get vaccinated last year.

Its not any better in Baltimore where the Sun call measles and mumps "dreadful diseases"

Then the Pittsburgh Parrots of the Post-Gazette take their shot at the issue in an article that begins:

In the face of increasing evidence that families who oppose vaccination are endangering their own children and public health, some doctors and patients are starting to fight back.

As I've stated before infectious illnesses are a part of living among other people. Therefore people choosing to live around others are at risk of catching something. My decision to forgo vaccines doesn't place others at risk, it just leaves them where they started.

And "fighting back?" How can you "fight back" when nobody's fighting with you. Just take your vaccine and go away - no fight. Their claims of fighting back are analogous to a thief fighting back against those refusing to be robbed.

Not to be denied a whack at the dead horse of the 2010 pertussis epidemic, the article's author continues:

in some pockets on the West Coast, 20 to 30 percent of the residents are unvaccinated...As a result, California is now experiencing its worst whooping cough outbreak in 50 years, with nearly 9,000 people infected and 10 children dead, and Pennsylvania's cases jumped more than 50 percent last year, to 950.

The piece continues, bemoaning the demise of the herd:

...there is an unsettling decrease in "herd immunity" in the American population. When vaccination rates are high, it doesn't matter if some individuals get preventable diseases, because they won't be able to spread very far.

Even though, and I don't know how many ways to say this, VACCINATION RATES ARE AT ALL-TIME HIGHS!!!

Our old friend Gregory Poland then appears claiming:

...about three of every 1,000 people who get measles die from it.

The doctor employs a common tactic of the vaccinator: make the illness seem more dangerous than it actually is.

Poland's probably constructing his numbers from data accumulated during the early 90s where mild measles cases were underreported and infants were more vulnerable than in the pre-vaccine era because mothers passed on less effective maternal antibodies (due to gaining immunity from vaccination and not natural infection)

Additionally the epidemic was concentrated amoung the poor: a group that is more severly effected by almost any infectious illness.

A more accurate measure of measles severity is derived from the CDC's estimate that ~3 to 4 million children contracted the illness each year resulting in 450-500 deaths - leaving us with a mortality ratio of ~1-8,000. And even that ratio overestimates the likelihood of death in a healthy child since those with risk factors such as malnutrition are far more likely to experience severe cases - just as a smoker is far more likely to suffer from lung cancer

Next, Julius Youngner, who helped develop the Salk polio vaccine is quoted:

"When you have a disease like smallpox where 30 percent who get the disease die, and you have this terrible scarring with the survivors, vaccine eradication becomes very popular," he said.

Apparently Younger hasn't read the aforementioned Baltimore Sun piece which states:

Brandeis University historian Michael Willrich is writing a book on the history of smallpox, and in an essay in The New York Times, he describes government troops and city policemen wielding clubs for the forcible administration of smallpox vaccine to suspicious factory workers and immigrants.

Finally it's back to Dr. Poland who ends on an "encouraging" note :

I've found...vaccine-hesitant parents can be reached with targeted education."

Of course those familiar with this blog know "targeted education" is simply a euphemism for propaganda

In conclusion, we examine the Manhattan Institute's City Journal where the the authors - one of whom is the director of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Medical Progress - open with a combination of parrotry and typical Machine deception, squawking:

Vaccines, which save millions of lives every year,

Somehow they fail to mention that, even if these numbers were correct, they apply, not to America where we live, but to Africa, India and other remote corners of the globe where abysmal living condition play a far more powerful role that do mean old bugs and germs.

Then, turning their attention to the poor dead horse of pertussis (now battered beyond all recognition and only identifiable through dental records), they query:

Why, then, is that sickness [pertussis] making a scary comeback in California, which is currently weathering its largest whooping-cough epidemic since 1947, with over 7,800 cases and 10 deaths in 2010? Mainly because more and more parents, worried about the vaccine’s supposed side effects, are choosing to delay vaccinating their children—or not to do it at all.

I've debunked this assertion here and here.

Their next talking point claims that it's those damn "affluent and well-educated" who are spoiling everything for the rest of us by failing to comply with the wishes of our omniscient public health mandarins. This talking point seems to be an attempt to stir up a little class warfare and turn American against American - after all since when is wise to follow not the educated but the poor and ignorant.

The piece ends talking about "today’s anti-vaccine hysteria" which corresponds to their notion that anyone who declines a vaccine must be out of their minds (either naturally or as a result of panic, fear or hysteria) But I, and most others I know, when deciding against vaccination, were of sound mind and not in someway impaired.

Apparently unable to think for themselves, these "journalists" just parrot the spoon-fed talking points of public health functionaries. So when reading one of these stories extolling the miracles of vaccination, look past the feathers and see the facts. And remember, just because a parrot repeats something doesn't mean it's true.

Offit on Colbert

 

The Machine media blitz that began with the recent attacks against Andrew Wakefield continued last night as Paul Offit appeared in a well-rehearsed performance on The Colbert Report.

As the show progressed, I was having difficulty determining who knew less about vaccines, Offit or Colbert, until I realized Offit’s ignorance was only apparent – a result of placing pro-vaccine misinformation ahead of honesty.

The doctor recited his deceptive talking points beginning with a fanciful story (thoroughly debunked here) about how a pertussis outbreak was in some way related to people choosing not to vaccinate.

Colbert then jokingly informed us that his doctor encouraged his sick child/children to go to school while sick in order to expose other children to whatever illness necessitated the doctor visit. Amazingly Offit, imagining a past that never occurred, responded, “that’s what we used to do”

Colbert then asks about a possible connection between autism and vaccinations. That question has been asked and answered retorts Dr. Offit. Studies have shown vaccines don’t cause autism! Wow what a relief. But wait I know the mercury compound thimerisol has been studied but that’s not a “vaccine.” And the MMR vaccine was studied by those producing and promoting vaccination but that’s only one of dozens of vaccines given. So it’s at best disingenuous to imply that vaccination itself has, as a cause of autism, ever been, in any way investigated.

I really can’t believe he continues to disseminate this repugnant piece of misinformation.  Especially when he, in his new book, exhorts us to trust the Machine saying:

When parents choose to vaccinate their children, one element is critical to the decision: trust. A choice not to vaccinate is a choice not to trust those who research, manufacture, license, recommend, promote and administer vaccines – specifically, the government, pharmaceutical companies, and doctors. If we are again to believe that vaccines are safer than the diseases they prevent, we’re going to have to trust those responsible for them. This isn’t going to be easy.

You're right doctor, it’s not going to be easy. That's because trust isn’t built on a foundation of misinformation and deception. Trust is earned by trustworthy behavior. If you truly wanted to build trust you would have said something to the effect that mercury, the one and only vaccine ingredient ever studied as a possible cause of autism, was suspected because it has a reputation for toxicity and because it’s administered during a time in which autism either develops or is diagnosed.

And you wouldn’t forget to mention that no one really knew how much mercury was contained within the entire vaccine schedule and that no one knew what that meant for children’s safety.

You would have continued by informing viewers that only one of dozens of vaccines and vaccine combinations has ever been studied and those studies were conducted by the institutions selling and promoting the very vaccines under investigation.

That is if you were concerned about building trust. Unfortunately you’re not; you’re concerned about selling vaccine.

Rather than inspiring trust, Dr. Offit’s never-ending media appearances inspire me to question more deeply studies extolling the safety of vaccines. His blatant attempts to alter reality in order to shelter vaccines makes it exceedingly difficult to believe studies done by Offit and those who inhabit his world.

The Age-Old Struggle Against the Egghead Do-Gooder

Recently Dr. Gregory Poland* wrote an article for the New England Journal of Medicine entitled The Age-Old Struggle against the Antivaccinationist. In the piece he labeled anyone questioning the use of vaccines as essentially half-wits, incapable of thinking or acting for themselves. The doctor claimed:

Today, the spectrum of antivaccinationists ranges from people who are simply ignorant about science (or “innumerate” — unable to understand and incorporate concepts of risk and probability into science-grounded decision  making) to a radical fringe element who use deliberate mistruths, intimidation, falsified data, and threats of violence in efforts to prevent the use of vaccines and to silence critics. Antivaccinationists tend toward complete mistrust of government and manufacturers, conspiratorial thinking, denialism, low cognitive complexity in thinking patterns, reasoning flaws, and a habit of substituting emotional anecdotes for data.

Luckily, Dr. Poland has a solution for our intellectual failings: he's going to think and make decisions for us.
With the goal of making this solution acceptable - and to defend any challenges to the vaccine establishment upon which he depends - he uses his article to further disparage "antivaccinationists" and, likely referring to a number of death threats Paul Offit has received, expresses concern over “a radical fringe element who use…threats of violence in efforts to prevent the use of vaccines…”

Dr. Poland apparently feels it’s only appropriate to use force to compel the use of vaccines. After all he directs no criticism towards states that use threats of violence to coerce parents into vaccinating their children: the most egregious recent example of such behavior occurred in Maryland in 2007. The Washington Post, in a story entitled Get Kids Vaccinated Or Else..., reported:

The parents of more than 2,300 Prince George's County students who failed to get needed vaccinations could face fines of $50 a day and up to 10 days in jail if their children do not meet the state's immunization requirements, county officials said yesterday..

Poland then, in an effort to create fears about what would happen if large numbers of people decided not to vaccinate, mentions an increase of pertussis incidence that occurred in the 70s and 80s when DTP vaccination, due to safety concerns, either declined or ended in countries such as England, Japan and Sweden, He fails however to report that actual pertussis deaths remained low, hovering from single to low double digits - numbers comparable to those occurring in highly vaccinated populations

He goes on to imagine that, "the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009 and 2010 revealed a strong public fear of vaccination, stoked by antivaccinationists

Due to his love of vaccines, he's unable to get his [egg] head around the idea that, despite the endless and fanatical hype, his miracle drugs are simply unwanted. For him, only someone mesmerized by a “movement” or caught up in a wave of “fear” could turn down a flu shot.

Returning to the fear mongering, he repeats the Paul Offit / Seth Mnookin myth that Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 MMR / autism study has led to low vaccination rates and as a result the California pertussis epidemic of 2010

Then in an attempt to find a solution to the troublesome antivaccinator Poland asks "…what can we do to hasten the funeral of antivaccination campaigns?"

His answer, "first, we must continue to fund and publish high-quality studies to investigate concerns about vaccine safety.

Oddly, Dr. Poland imagines studies conducted with the expressed purpose of achieving a political end, in this case hastening the funeral of antivaccination campaigns, could in anyway be though of a “high quality.”

And where would Dr. Poland get the funding for his “high quality” studies? Most likely from the vaccine industry itself – after all, his Mayo clinic received in 2008 over $300 million dollars from government and industry.

Another way to hasten the funeral of antivaccination campaigns is, according to the doctor, "public education and persuasion." In other words propaganda - since this education is goal, rather than knowledge, oriented. These definitions of propaganda are enlightening:

information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause

Propaganda is a form of communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. ...

Wanting to eggsamine what drives his eggstremism, I turned to the internet and found a revealing Mayo clinic article detailing a disturbing portrayal of fanticism. The article's sycophantic author reported:

Dr. Gregory Poland is at once a warrior and a healer. He needs to be, he believes, because the war is real—too real—and the enemy is relentless.

In Dr. Poland's war, there are no rules of engagement; anything goes. The enemy is what Dr. Poland calls "unwarranted death." These are deaths caused by infectious diseases that could have been prevented by vaccinations. It is an enemy that is as ruthless as it is resourceful. Says Dr Poland:

"I was born into a Marine Corps family, and I spent my childhood growing up on military bases. As I went through medical school and residency, I knew right then and there that the warrior I was meant to be was the warrior taking on infectious diseases, to prevent them—because I just have a really hard time with death. Unwarranted death, the unexpected death."

He describes those wanting to choose whether or not to have their children medicated as a “radical fringe element” yet his own words reveal him to being far more radical than any so-called “anti-vaccinator”

Do-gooders such as Dr. Poland are perpetually at war; fighting drugs, poverty, obesity and the like. But as blogger and author Christopher Chantrill points out:

when you conduct domestic politics using the moral equivalent of war metaphor you do not just conduct a War on Poverty or a war for Energy Independence. Wars are not conducted against an idea but against people. You end up making your fellow Americans into a hated enemy.

Conduct your war Dr Poland; just do it without me. For when you force people to participate, your War on Bugs becomes a war against the very freedom upon which this country was built.

* The article was coauthored by Dr. Robert Jacobson. This post focuses on Dr. Poland because, based on his history [described below] it's my belief that he is the driving force behind the piece.

Dr Poland

Serves as the President of the International Society for Vaccines. The groups aim is "to encourage, establish and promote the development and the use of vaccines..."

He's the American Editor for the journal Vaccine.

In 1998, he received a joint award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Health Care Financing Administration for his contribution to increasing adult immunization rates in the U.S. which was awarded by the Surgeon General of the United States.

He's a member of the National Network for Immunization Information's steering committee

Dr. Poland participates on many national and academic review committees and actively peer-reviews journal articles for over 26 different publications such as The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine and New England Journal of Medicine.

A prolific writer, Dr. Poland has published over 160 peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters.

AC Mnookin 5150

Yesterday I had the great pleasure to come across, in both print and on TV, vaccination's newest fan boy: Seth Mnookin. Mnookin, a former music critic, has just written The Panic Virus: a forthcoming book exploring the controversy surrounding vaccinations and autism. I’d just finished reading a Newsweek article he’d written when I noticed that CNN’s Anderson Cooper was hosting a segment on the topic of Mnoonkin’s book: vaccines and autism. The article, and appearance with Cooper, found Mnookin reciting a number of vaccine establishment talking points (if these guys were in high school they’d all get kicked out for copying each others work) Chief among these talking points was that vaccination rates are "plummeting" and this is causing, throughout the country, enormous suffering and death.

There’s only one problem with Mnookin's scenario: vaccination rates are today incredibly high.

In September 2010 Anne Schuchat, M.D., director of CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases stated

it's encouraging to see immunization rates remaining high...Nearly all parents are choosing to have their children protected against dangerous childhood diseases through vaccination," 

As a result of a mismatch between reality and expedience the establishment has found it necessary to create a scenario in which a decline – no matter how small - in one segment of the population has the power to offset high levels of compliance in the larger population

These small declines - significant statistically but miniscule in terms of actual numbers - are purported to be taking place in "enclaves" of affluent and well educated. The "enclave" claim serves not only the purpose of perpetuating the myth that vaccination rates are collapsing but that those responsible for the non-existent collapse are somehow strange, different and weird. Not like the rest of obedient America

One particular result of the imagined disintegration of vaccination rates is, according to Mnookin, a pertussis outbreak which occurred in California in 2010.

But when we step outside of the world of fantasy and into the one of reality we find it’s The Enclaves of Affluence thesis that disintegrates. Here’s why:

The brunt of the epidemic was borne, not by the affluent, but by Hispanic Americans, a group whose median income is about half that of non-hispanic whites. According to ABC News

Three-quarters of hospitalizations occurred in infants younger than 6 months, and of those, three-quarters were Hispanic

And nine of the ten deaths in California were in Hispanic children. This even though the group comprises only 37% of the state's population

Additionally The New York Times in a story entitled "Vaccination Is Steady, but Pertussis Is Surging" reports

The rise in pertussis doesn’t seem to be related to parents’ refusing to have their children vaccinated for fear of potential side effects. In California, pertussis rates are about the same in counties with high childhood vaccination rates and low ones. And the C.D.C. reports that pertussis immunization rates have been stable or increasing since 1992.

Nothing about enclaves, pockets of non-compliance or increasing exemptions

What then are the real reasons for this recent outbreak? They're quite simple and, unlike the enclave argument, have actually evidence supporting them.

The Vaccine Isn’t Very Good

An initial series of five shots administered between the ages of 2months and 6years is followed by a booster at ten or eleven. Then a single adult vaccination that may, according to Dr. Mark Sawyer, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of California San Diego, eventually be given every ten years. That is until at some point our public health masters simply hook up to a pertussis vaccine IV

So what is it that we get for all these injections? Well according to Michael Sicilia, a spokesman for the California Department of Public Health “the pertussis vaccine isn't perfect and its protection wanes after about five years.”

And even five years of protection may be an overly optimistic assessment. According to The San Diego Union-Tribune

Health officials launched the study after realizing that a significant number of 7- to 10-year-olds who got the recommended five-dose series of pertussis immunizations between the ages of 2 months and six years are coming down with whooping cough this year. 

Unfortunately this “protection” pales in comparison to natural immunity. According to a study appearing in PLOS Pathogens:

Our results support a period of natural immunity that is, on average, long-lasting (at least 30 years) but inherently variable. 

In light of the above, it’s not surprising that between 66 and 75% of cases were in the vaccinated

Adults Don’t Want It 

Normal adults, not just those living in enclaves, don't want the pertussis vaccine. According to the CDC just 6-14% of adults have received it.

San Diego public health officials claim:

...we need 90 percent of the population to be vaccinated to have sufficient group immunization... based on our surveys in San Diego, we believe that just 10 percent of adults have had the booster. 

A Million Unreported Cases Each Year 

It been long known that every year there are several million cases most of which go undiagnosed. According to a 2003 commentary appearing in Pediatric by leading pertussis expert James D. Cherry, MD:

There are about 1 million cases of pertussis in adolescents and adults in the United States each year and about 13% of all prolonged cough illnesses in adolescents and adults are attributable to B pertussis infection.

It's hard to have herd immunity when the herd has pertussis.

The Normal 5 Year Cycle

Pertusis epidemics occur in cycles of approxamately five years. The last epidimic in 2005 lead to eight deaths in California: almost the same number as 2010. For the country as a whole, it appears overall deaths in 2010 will fail to exceed 2005's total

Mom's with Vaccine-Induced "Immunity"

If you contract pertussis at ten and therefore obtain at least thirty years of natural immunity, it's unlikely your baby will contract the illness from you. If on the other hand, your vaccine-induced immunity was obtained at eleven, your five years of protection will have expired by the time you have children.

So based on the evidence, it seems Mnookin's borrowed thesis is not a viable theory but rather a simple contrivance designed to do nothing more than push more and more unwanted vaccine on a skeptical public