Publisher’s note: This test was initially published in 2015.
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I started, striped and even abandoned the writing of this essay. I couldn’t do it. It was not there. I didn’t feel it.
Something continued to harass me, and it took a while to finally understand what it was.
This is the idea that this article would be labeled “opinion” or “editorial” in the first place.
Of course, there are subjects that seem to lend themselves in an appropriate manner to the pages of opinion. Vaccines, however, which have prevented 6 million people dead each year in the world and have fundamentally changed modern medicine, should not appear on this list.
The advantage of vaccines is not a question of opinion. It is a matter of fact.
Studies, including a meta-analysis of 1.2 million children in 2014, show no link between vaccines and autism. It is not a question of opinion. It is a matter of fact.
That you are 100 times more likely to be struck by lightning than having a serious allergic reaction to the vaccine that protects you from measles is not a question of opinion. It is also a matter of fact.
The facts should be important and science should win, but after 13 years as a medical journalist, I know that it is not so simple.
Science often loses zeal argument for ideology, and in some respects, it is easy to understand why.
At the heart of the vaccine argument is the great challenge of trying to prove a negative.
If you or your child never get the disease that the vaccine has been designed to prevent, there is no surprise. There is no title. Life continues.
The back of the medal, however, is the child in a million (literally, 1/1,000,000) which has a serious undesirable reaction. It is likely to do the news, to confirm the worst fears and to lead to the enrollment of an army in the fight against vaccines.
It should be noted that 12 in 10,000 people who take aspirin are at risk of intracerebral hemorrhage or bleeding in the brain. People who regularly take too much acetaminophen are the largest group of hospitalized people for acute liver insufficiency. And, on average, a person in the United States dies each year from H20 poisoning or drinking too much water. And yet, no army has been formed against aspirin, Tylenol or water.
David Katz, director of the Yale University Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, wrote that it was no more logical to complain about vaccines because you have heard of someone who could have had an adverse reaction than to cease to walk because you have heard of a pedestrian struck by a car.
In many ways, it is a luxury of being able to have this discussion.
After spending time in West Africa to cover the Ebola epidemic, I saw how people hoped, wanted and prayed for a vaccine – to no avail.
On the other hand, the measles vaccine is easily available, and yet vaccination rates in certain regions of the United States are similar to the refugee camps that I have visited in Haiti, Pakistan and Jordan.
Yes, parents have a choice in this country.
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It is a choice that so many others in the world will never have.
Of course, I vaccinated my children. I didn’t think twice. Not a big fan of measles or mumps or rubella – to name some very avoidable diseases.
And that’s where I can help a moment of opinion.
The anti-vaccination argument is often wrapped in the feeling “I like my children”. And I find it, well, a little insulting.
To suggest that anyone who vaccisted their children does not like them is a whole new level of madness. But here is the fact, for me.
It is not only because I like my children that I vaccinated them. It is because I also like your children.