I cannot think of anything I might write that would change Margaret Burgess's view that immunisation against disease has done nothing except harm humankind (Taken in, Letters May 18), and I will not try the patience of your readers by trying to do so.
The false prophet Wakefield was not struck off the Medical Register for minor fudging of results, but for being " ... an incompetent scientist willing to commit research fraud to provide evidence for trial lawyers to use in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers ... ". His book only reinforces that view.
To aver that there was a political conspiracy of some sort in which the Lancet, the General Medical Council and the US Center for Disease Control were complicit, would be laughable were it not such a worryingly bizarre belief, and his supervisor, Professor Walker Smith, was very lucky to escape being struck off, at the cost of being labelled an honest dupe rather than a research cheat.
The film Vaxxed, also by the fraudulent Wakefield, has been doing the rounds lately, and received uniformly bad, even hostile reviews from those in a position to know something about immunology.
Local people who might have forked out their $6 dollars to view it might want to balance this wet fart from the anti-immunisation crankosphere by referring to the excellent Immunisation handbook by the New Zealand Department of Health, which is available on line at: http://immunisation.book.health.govt.nz/.
It gives more information than most people would wish, but there are some excellent graphs and data that are easy to follow and which show clearly the positive association of immunisation with falling disease rates.
Nothing is perfect. Some people who are immunised against a disease get it nevertheless. Rarely, some are harmed by being immunised, and it is appropriate that they should be compensated by governments, but the risk of serious harm from the vaccine-preventable diseases is many hundreds of times greater than the risk of serious harm from immunisation against them. Do the right thing by your children and society and get them immunised.
Declaration of interest: I was subject to propaganda about immunology by the dupes of Big Pharma in the Pathology Department of the University of Cambridge in 1965/66.
