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Pseudoscience and vaccinations

WARNING: No library content is involved in this post. Thank you.

Nothing gets my hackles up more than the current fashion in the US of denigrating science as something to not be trusted. The list of absolutely insane beliefs that people cling to here in the US would take hours to enumerate, but for parents to threaten a scientist because he is doing good science is just…*boggle* Read this article in the NYT about Paul Offit and see what I mean.

It’s not that I don’t have sympathy for parents who have autistic children…I do. My heart breaks, and if I discovered that Eliza had a genetic disease I would be destroyed. But my emotional reaction to it doesn’t change the science, and the science says that vaccines don’t cause autism. On the contrary, vaccinations are arguably the single most important development in children’s health of the last 100 years.

There’s a lot of emotion around this subject. But the fact of the matter is that vaccinations save children’s lives. If you are a parent, please, please, please: Have your children vaccinated.