Shot of Prevention

By Amy Pisani

Definitely take a minute to read this excellent piece in Forbes magazine from Robert Nelson, the father of an autistic child and a venture capitalist. Recently, Forbes has been running excellent articles on vaccines (check out their recent piece  “Stars vs. Science”), but this one hits it out of the park. It is truly scary what the consequences of vaccine exemptions look like. Nelson articulates it very well in this article, describing the anti-vaccine movement’s attempts to “scare people on blogs with false data and junk science, even though the risk from vaccines is a millionfold less than the risk from the diseases they prevent.” 

One of the moms I work with through ECBT, Brendalee Flint, whose daughter Julieanna almost died from Hib disease (you can read her story here), relies on the majority of her neighbors to vaccinate their kids because Julieanna suffers from a rare immune disorder which leaves her vulnerable to disease. It’s statistics like this one that keep her up at night worrying: “Because of their efforts, rubella, whooping cough, measles and meningitis are all on the rise in a country that spends 16% of its GDP on health care. In 2004 there were 26,000 reported cases of whooping cough in the U.S., up from only 1,000 in 1976.” 

Please share this article with your friends and family. It’s so important that people realize not only do vaccines save individual lives, they help keep entire communities healthy and disease-free.