The Squamish Chief put out a Facebook alert for vaccinations after Vancouver Coastal Health issued a warning about several new cases of the mumps.
Sounds pretty innocent and straightforward, right? Well, wrong.
We were greeted by a message that said: “I think it’s very wrong for your newspaper to be posting an article that supports and pushes vaccinations. Write an honest article that talks about both sides and the side effects of vaccinations... You have lost me as a reader.”
I can see where this person is coming from, because journalists are supposed to weigh both sides of a story. But there are some cases where facts are so established, they do not warrant a debate. Vaccination is one of them.
If we are going to debate the efficacy of vaccination, we may as well start discussing whether or not the sky is indeed blue.
Shall we also interview Flat Earth Society members, who actually believe the earth is flat, to get their take on things?
The answer is no.
Every time a vaccine is introduced, there is almost always an immediate and dramatic drop in the incidence of a disease. For example, the World Health Organization says “The real, permanent drop in measles incidence coincided with the licensure and wide use of measles vaccine beginning in 1963. Other vaccine-preventable diseases show a roughly similar pattern in incidence.”
Many anti-vaxxers insist drops in disease naturally happened over time as the result of better sanitation and nutrition.
So let’s test that idea. If that theory holds any water, then the occurrence of diseases should stay low in countries that reduce vaccinations, because the two would supposedly be unrelated.
But in countries that reduced vaccinations, there was immediate uptick in preventable diseases.
The World Health Organization says that Great Britain implemented cutbacks on whooping cough vaccination because people distrusted the treatment.
What happened immediately after?
“In Great Britain, a drop in pertussis [whooping cough] vaccination in 1974 was followed by an epidemic of more than 100,000 cases of pertussis and 36 deaths by 1978,” says the WHO.
Another argument insists that vaccination can cause autism. This is nonsense. Because parents sometimes notice symptoms of autism when their kids are young – often the same time they are getting vaccinated – they think there is a link between the two.
But studies show that autism develops before birth. If a condition is present in people before they are vaccinated, how can that be the cause?
I could go on like this, but if you want to insist the sky is green, you can do so with the Flat Earth Society, but not me.
