The Timid Activist

An article ran this week on the front page of the Cheyenne paper entitled “Are vaccines safe for kids?” It was a bad article as it pitted the local experts (a pediatrician and a state epidemiologist) against some activists from Wyoming with no credentials who are against vaccines blah blah blah. It gave five websites for people to check out the supposed pros and cons, two were good, WebMD and the CDC but three were awful, conspiracy theory sites, vaccines cause autism and brain damage etc. stuff. There was no mention of the importance of herd immunity nor the very recent outbreaks in our country of whooping cough and other preventable diseases due to the lowered herd immunity from larger numbers of people choosing not to vaccinate their children.

Anyway, I made a comment in the comments section for the article online (along with many anti-vaccination activists who thought the article was” balanced” and “fair”) about what was missing in the article and that children’s lives were at stake. In a second comment I gave a link for an OP-ED piece that I had just seen in the LA Times that was excellent and I said this is what the journalist could have written and did the paper need to find a good science adviser? If you want to read the original article here is a link and you can read through the comments if you want to. http://www.wyomingnews.com/articles/2011/07/17/news/01top_07-17-11.txt

 

But, the kind of interesting thing is that the Cheyenne paper ran than same OP-ED piece that I had mentioned in my comment today on the opinion page. Here is the link to the original piece. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ropeik-vaccines-20110718,0,4240440.story

 

Maybe someone listened, or they were going to run it anyway and I am just imagining that I had anything to do with it. It won’t change the minds of the committed anti-vaccination activists but maybe a local person swayed away from vaccinations by the original article will think twice about that after reading the OP-ED piece. I hope so.

Lou