Vaccinating Away Our Freedom.

• Author: Orient, Jane M.
• Position: MEDICINE & HEALTH

ACCORDING TO the Oath of Hippocrates, physicians have a duty to advise their patients according to the best of their ability and judgment. In a majority of cases, most doctors recommend vaccination, believing that, for a particular patient, the benefit exceeds the risk. Patients or their parents, however, have the right to decline to follow their doctor's advice.

With vaccination, though, government restricts this right. Every time there is a measles outbreak somewhere, an outcry arises to restrict vaccine exemptions, to protect the public--and, just coincidentally, vaccine manufacturers.

Measles is extremely contagious and, with today's air travel, a patient incubating measles but not yet sick can arrive any time and cough virus particles all over Disneyland. Most patients recover fully, with robust lifelong immunity, but some get serious complications or die. Measles is two to four times worse than in pre-vaccination days because it affects more adults and infants. Mothers with only waning vaccine-induced immunity cannot give their babies the antibodies that once protected infants of naturally immunized mothers during their most-vulnerable period.

The public health or guilt-trip rationale is this: "My baby is immunosuppressed and cannot get vaccinated. So, you must vaccinate your baby because, if there is an outbreak, your unvaccinated baby might catch measles and give it to my baby, who might die." Of course, parents fear for their children, although the last measles death in the U.S. occurred in 2015.

This argument assumes that the risk of vaccine to healthy children does not exist--or does not matter. Worries are attributed to "anti-vax quacks," and the omniscient Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook reportedly is going to protect the public by suppressing information he judges to be "not credible." Public health people in Phoenix, Ariz., prevented the screening of the 2016 movie "Vaxxed: from Cover-Up to Catastrophe." The film shows children with devastating neurologic damage, and parents telling how their once normal child changed dramatically just after getting a vaccine--but these are mere anecdotes; there is "overwhelming evidence" of safety, the experts assure us.

Most children tolerate their vaccines well, but package inserts list an intimidating number of rare but serious events that can be caused by the vaccine. Moreover, according to the Cochrane Collaboration, "The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR [mumps, measles...