Web Letters: Back Talk: Paul Offit

I am more that a little surprised at seeing such an unbalanced piece about vaccinations in The Nation. I would direct Christine Smallwood to the most complete overview of the research on vaccinations available in print, Tim O'Shea's The Sanctity of Human Blood: Vaccination is not Immunization if she would like to truly plumb the shallows of the vaccine industry's own belief in their products. The US government's own statistics on incidence of the major diseases that vaccines were supposedly developed to fight show very clearly that they had all run their coarse and become rare before the vaccines were introduced. Polio, for instance, was all the way down to 1,604 deaths by 1956, when the vaccine was first introduced. Diptheria stood at 467 cases when its corresponding vaccine was introduced in 1946, down from 48,839 deaths in 1901! Vaccines didn't have anything to do with the reduction in any of the diseases they were developed for. Also, the vaccine industry only agreed not to put mercury into new vaccines--they are allowed to, and still do, give children vaccines containing hundreds of times the recommended safe levels of mercury from their huge stockpiles of vaccines. Read this meticulously documented book, and you will understand that many parents who decide not to vaccinate their children are neither hard-headed nor ignorant. Just the opposite.

William Berkemeyer

Richmond, VA