Who Says All Doctors Endorse Vaccines?

You need an editor. You are verbose, repetitive and state obvious things as though you just revealed a deep meaning. I like your enthusiasm though Fred.
Think succinct.

I don't have a lot of time at the moment so forgive my incomplete comment. I believe the problem is that when you hear that vaccines work you are often hearing an epidemiological argument. If you vaccinate 1 million people you save 1000 lives let's say, only for round numbers. If you don't vaccinate, you lose 2000 lives. Obviously you should vaccinate! EXCEPT: those aren't the same lives! they are different people who would have had the response. That's why individual choice comes in. Do you want to roll the dice and trust your body and modern day treatment or do you you want to inject the potential damage upfront?

By the way, the numbers aren't anywhere near that lopsided. In fact, suffering a side effect from a vaccine for say small pox is statistically much much more likely to harm you than your current chance for getting small pox. I picked that one on purpose because it's not controversial right now.

I also would like to add that the media blaming anti vaccine thoughts on Wakefield and MMR and autism isn't true in my case. You can tell where I stand. I have had this opinion for 25 years and could give you many more reasons than that

Freedom of choice is big. We want individual freedoms. Strap people down and forcing them to vaccinate is something out of a Sci Fi movie and should never become reality...

Like any product on the market, make it safe, make it effective and people will buy it. Cover up safety issues, pay a companies liability insurance for them and make them immune to lawsuit, why bother doing real research.

By the way, do they still break up the lots and ship them around the country in case they cook a hot batch? They used to so they don't create a scare. I haven't heard this in a while but I know that pediatricians used to have to record the lot number. That made me wonder.

Enough from me. Nice site, nice people discussing. Blessings. I got a little long.

This is a very interesting and ongoing debate. One that I have been entrenched in since 2007 when my wife and I had our first child. This debate was largely fueled by Andrew Wakefield, a former surgeon and medical researcher who published a fraudulent research paper in 1998 that claimed there is a physiological link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. In 2010, 12 years after publishing his fraudulent paper, it was determined that the facts of the paper had been falsified. But the damage had been done.

Twelve years of fear and scare tactics is not easily undone. Especially when we're talking about parents' instinctive nature to protect their children. Marry that with a growing distrust of all things governmental and we have a situation where many parents simply DO NOT trust what the government, the CDC, the pharmaceutical companies, and even their doctors tell them. We question everything, AS WE SHOULD.

That said, I think it's in our childrens' best interest to question and research OBJECTIVELY. It's hard to do because you don't know what to believe anymore. It's certainly not easy for a parent to conduct their own investigation into the validity of any research paper or scientific claim. We have to rely on other organizations to do this, ironic isn't it?

We HOPE that there is some entity out there that sincerely cares about the kids. As a result, parents make what they think is the best decision based on what they have heard and read. And that's where we are today, with good parents on either side of this debate, doing the best they can to protect their children in a climate of distrust.

What I find most sad about this debate is the contempt I see from a lof of pro-vaccine parents towards anti-vaccine parents. Parents who don't vaccinate are doing the same thing that parents who do vaccinate are doing - they are doing what they think will best protect their children (unless they are not vaccinating due to religious beliefs, that's a separate issue). No one should judge parents who don't vaccinate. Many or most of them are very fearful that the poisonous chemicals contained in those vaccines will harm their precious little children (short-term or long-term). Who can blame them?

My wife and I questioned the MMR vaccine specifically because of Wakefield's study and other claims "out there." We ultimately got the MMR vaccinations for our children but we delayed many of the other recommended vaccinations and got them on a more spaced out schedule. We decided to vaccinate because, in our opinion, the available science supports their benefits.

So our kids are vaccinated, but it wasn't an easy process on us, it was even very stressful at times. We even dreaded some pediatrician visits where we knew we were going to tell our pro-vaccination doctor that "we're gonna' wait on that vaccination for another 3 months." Good luck to all you parents out there struggling with this debate. I don't think it will end anytime soon.

Fred this is one of the more controversial topics in health today. I'm not a parent and honestly have no idea what I will do when and if I become one. Many credible people believe that the anti-vaccine stance has allowed diseases once believed to be eradicated to make a comeback. I haven't heard the term measles since I was a kid and yet it's in the news every day now. What do we say to this?

For me as a mom it's really confusing Fred what to use. Some sources are for, some are against it. Friends say yes, internet says no. Wikipedia shows statistics and non-verified sources show anti-statistics.

Who is right and who is wrong? Can't there be a group of pediatricians that would investigate this once and for all? Are all pediatricians afraid to get out from the shadows and speak out about this?

Thanks