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"It reveals how vaccines have had a greater impact on reducing death and disability from infectious diseases than almost any other public health intervention, yet their effectiveness is being undermined by a loss of public confidence thanks to media fear-mongering."

The issue has never been that MMR doesn't, in most cases, keep children from getting those three diseases. It isn't even that in a cost/benefit analysis children are better off statistically when they're vaccinated. It's the fact that a small number of children, for reasons unknown, acquire one of the severest of disabilities shortly after getting their MMR shot. Statistics mean little when it's your child who's drawn the short straw.

I've not followed this issue in much detail, but I've followed it well enough to notice that many in the scientific community have never been open-minded about this issue. They've been more concerned, as the comment above mine illustrates, about "public confidence" in what they do being "undermined" by these allegations. They want parents to do as they're told and not question their betters. That's not science, that's authoritarian dogma.

The scientific community would do well to talk less and listen more. After all two of the most effective treatments known to science, innoculation/vaccination and antibiotics, were recognized by ordinary people long before they were accepted by the medical community.

--Michael W. Perry, Seattle
Editor: Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized Society
Editor: Lady Eugenists: Feminist Eugenics in the Speeches and Writings of Victoria Woodhull