Alex,
I recently read your article "What's With Rich People Hating Vaccines" and was taken back. I have spent countless hours researching vaccine effectiveness in order to give the best information to the public so they can make informed decisions for themselves and their families. There are numerous articles that have been published in the peer-reviewed bio-medical literature that question the effectiveness of many of the politically enforced vaccinations, yet you failed to mention any of them. You essentially faulted the parents who took the time to research vaccines, and decided that the minute risk of their children contracting the diseases medical doctors tell us to inoculate against, did not actually outweigh the risk of injecting their children with the toxins and chemicals contained in the vaccines. Instead of writing a well-referenced, scientific article on the pros and cons of vaccination, you chose to write an opinionated article based upon pseudo-scientific misinformation.
The flu vaccine, for instance, is reported to reduce your risk of getting the flu by 60%, according to the literature the CDC uses for public policy. If you actually read the literature, the authors used relative risk assessment instead of absolute risk assessment, which increased the values astronomically. After a thorough review of the peer-reviewed literature, and compiling the data using absolute risk assessment (which applies to the general population), the flu vaccine only reduces your risk of getting the flu by 2%. Vitamin D has been proven to reduce your risk of getting the flu by 18%, which is not perfect but its much more effective. And far less dangerous. This is just one example of how vaccine effectiveness has been blown way out of proportion. If you look at the data, and peer-reviewed literature, the fact that many of the diseases we are told to vaccinate for in order to prevent were actually on the decline long before the vaccines were ever introduced is undisputed. Rich people don't "hate" vaccines, as you say in your article. Perhaps the population in these affluent communities are "rich" because they are more intelligent and highly educated. And perhaps the more educated people are, the greater their tendency may be to read and research and make informed decisions for themselves and their families rather than following every instruction given to them by their medical doctors like robots. Just a thought, since you are speculating about so much already, it can't hurt to suggest another possibility - one that might actually be supported by census data and other demographic information.
Furthermore, if vaccination is so effective, then what are all of these parents and children who choose to receive vaccinations so worried about? Only the kids who are not vaccinated should be getting the diseases, right? When there is a small outbreak of any disease, the CDC fails to report the number of children who got the disease that received the vaccine, they always talk about the unvaccinated one - which again, is misinformation.
I strongly encourage you to look into this further and educate yourself on topics that you choose to write about. I urge you to focus your energy on writing an informative article rather than an opinionated one. Something else to think about is that only 15% of medical interventions (drugs and surgery) are considered to be based on scientific evidence from the bio-medical journals. Policy will always trump scientific evidence when it comes to healthcare, and that is because of one thing: money.
Thanks,
Dr. Andrew Brady
