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@davidaugust @realcarlallen My friend Gary died of polio. I was five, he was seven. He was the boy next door. I remember playing with him in the stream where he likely contracted it. I remember going to the community centre for the sugar cube at the local vaccination drive that followed. Those of us that lived through it need to tell our stories.

Lenora

@maryeffrancis @davidaugust @realcarlallen my mother’s oldest brother died of polio as a toddler. His parents held him in their arms while he struggled to breathe then watched him die. In 1927 there was nothing that could help him and no vaccines to prevent it

@FaithinBones @maryeffrancis @realcarlallen I’m sorry that happened. That was so familiar and hard for so many families.

@davidaugust @maryeffrancis @realcarlallen I worry that the antivaxxers are going to be responsible for the comeback of polio in this country

@FaithinBones @maryeffrancis @realcarlallen I worry that too. I know many immunologists and vaccinologists do too.

@davidaugust @FaithinBones @realcarlallen

Measles is making a comeback in the U.K. Here’s the article in the British Medical Journal blowing the whistle on Andrew Wakefield’s claims that the MMR Vaccine caused Autism. Wakefield faked the data, and had his licence to practise medicine in the U.K. revoked as a consequence. I believe he now continues his deadly campaign in the USA:

bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c7452

The BMJ · Wakefield’s article linking MMR vaccine and autism was fraudulentClear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare “Science is at once the most questioning and . . . sceptical of activities and also the most trusting,” said Arnold Relman, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine , in 1989. “It is intensely sceptical about the possibility of error, but totally trusting about the possibility of fraud.”1 Never has this been truer than of the 1998 Lancet paper that implied a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and a “new syndrome” of autism and bowel disease.⇓ Authored by Andrew Wakefield and 12 others, the paper’s scientific limitations were clear when it appeared in 1998.2 3 As the ensuing vaccine scare took off, critics quickly pointed out that the paper was a small case series with no controls, linked three common conditions, and relied on parental recall and beliefs.4 Over the following decade, epidemiological studies consistently found no evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.5 6 7 8 By the time the paper was finally retracted 12 years later,9 after forensic dissection at the General Medical Council’s (GMC) longest ever fitness to practise hearing,10 few people could deny that it was fatally flawed both scientifically and ethically. But it has taken the diligent scepticism of one man, standing outside medicine and science, to show that the paper was in fact an elaborate fraud. In a series of articles starting this week, and seven years after first looking into the MMR scare, journalist Brian Deer now shows the extent of Wakefield’s fraud and how it was perpetrated (doi:10.1136/bmj.c5347). Drawing on interviews, documents, and data made public at the GMC hearings, Deer shows how Wakefield altered …

@maryeffrancis @davidaugust @realcarlallen the problem with the antivaxxers is they claim a lot of diseases are childhood diseases and they’re benign. No disease is benign and they refuse to admit that measles can actually kill. What’s really interesting is that most antivaxxers were given vaccines to prevent these diseases when they were young but want to doom their children