I get e-mail from Bob Park, the physicist curmudgeon/philosopher at the University of Maryland (I’ve added links):
Robert L. Park (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“DEADLY CHOICES”: PAUL OFFIT EXPOSES THE ANTI-VACCINE MOVEMENT.
There was never a time before people knew that falling trees and large animals with teeth can kill. Microbes are another matter. They had been killing us for perhaps 200,000 years before Antonie van Leeuwenhoek showed them to us. Paul Offit and two colleagues worked for 25 years to develop a vaccine for the rotavirus, a cause of gastroenteritis that kills as many as 600,000 children a year worldwide, mostly in underdeveloped countries. The vaccine is credited with saving hundreds of lives a day. Offit wrote “Autism’s False Prophets” in 2008 exposing British physician Andrew Wakefield for falsely claiming the MMR vaccineis linked to autism.
H. Fred Clark and Paul Offit, the inventors of RotaTeq. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Vaccination prevents more suffering than any other branch of medicine, but is still opposed by the scientifically ignorant who accept the upside-down logic of the alternative medicine movement. Because vaccination of schoolchildren against virulent childhood infections is ubiquitous, crackpots, scoundrels and gullible reporters get away with linking it to unrelated health problems as they did in the 1980s with the ubiquitous power lines. We still hear echoes of the power-line scare in the cell phone/cancer panic. Paul Offit has just written “Deadly Choices: How The Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All.” We need to do everything we can to stop it.
You don’t subscribe to Bob Park’s “What’s New?” You should.
THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author’s and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
—
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You’ll be smarter for reading his little missiles missives missiles.
More:
- Should a doctor fire an anti-vax patient? (genome.fieldofscience.com)
- A physician’s guide for anti-vaccine parents (medicalxpress.com)
- Analyzing An Epidemic of Fear (krystinaglobal.wordpress.com)
- Tactics and tropes of the antivaccine movement (scienceblogs.com)
- Anti-anti-vax: Getting to the gist (sciencebasedmedicine.org)
- Childhood Immunizations and Vaccinations | Special Edition | Education.com (education.com)
- The combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines and the total number of vaccines are not associated with development of autism spectrum disorder: The first case-control study in Asia. (leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk)
- Anti-anti-vax: Getting to the gist (sciencebasedpharmacy.wordpress.com)
- Listening to Louise Kuo Habakus at a “Vaccine Epidemic” Booksigning and Talk (lizditz.typepad.com)
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 