Vaccination & epidemic

With the withdrawal of 10 of the 13 original supporters from the original Lancet paper that kicked off the anti-vaccination craze (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9500320) and the revelation that Andrew Wakefield falsified his results linking vaccination to autism, it would seem as if the anti-vaccination lunatics (http://www.generationrescue.org/) would back off at least a little on their dangerous allegations that vaccines harm more than they save. Instead, it seems as if they've redoubled their efforts.

In discussing the vaccination issue with people who have chosen not to vaccinate their children, I find that a typical reaction to my pro-vaccination opinion is to assume that I simply haven't read enough. Naturally, given my specific interests in the fields of biochemistry and epidemiology, the opposite is true; if anything, I've read too much. I have watched my children, worried, after each vaccination, and breathed a sigh of relief when none of the many well-documented complications arose. None of those well-documented complications happen to be long-term mental deficiency or autism, but that's not stopping the anti-vaccination ignorant from promoting their potentially disastrous propaganda, nor is it stopping the resurgence of formerly eradicated and dangerous diseases like mumps, measles, and rubella. Even tuburculosis and the horrible crippling disease of polio, formerly considered extinct, is on the rise.

Why, in this day of new and increasingly dangerous epidemics such as AIDS and SARS, are we allowing idiots to disarm our bottom-line defenses against diseases we defeated decades ago? This is sheer insanity.