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In 1976, Professor Thomas McKeown, investigating trends in mortality, compared declining death-rates from infectious diseases with medical interventions since the cause of death was first registered in 1838. He found that immunisation had no significant effect on the trend of the death-rate from measles, which had fallen to a low level before mass vaccination was introduced, because of major improvements in sanitation and nutrition. So too had morbidity, the incidence of the disease.

Those of us who haven't had our children vaccinated aren't cranky obsessives or zealous Jehovah's Witnesses. On the contrary, we're mostly pretty well-informed, as you have to be if you refuse the orthodoxy of vaccination. We do so for two main reasons, neither of them specifically to do with autism, which most people would agree is dreadful but only affects a small number of children.

“The first, and most shocking one, is that vaccination simply can't sustain the claims made for it.”

In the US immunisation rates are as high as 98% is some areas, and yet there are still regular measles epidemics. The Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta found that 80% of measles cases in 1985 occurred in children who had been vaccinated, while a 1987 outbreak affected a secondary school more than 99% of whose pupils had had live measles vaccine. In Italy there were just 10 deaths from measles between 1989-91, even though they had only 40% coverage from the vaccine. In the following two years coverage from the vaccine grew, as did deaths from measles (to 28). So much for "herd immunity".

“Second, we believe that in the case of infectious diseases, Pasteur's germ theory has been oversold.”

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A Pox on Vaccines

Parents who refuse to have children immunized are regarded as dangerous cranks - in defiance of the facts.  - Anne Karpf

We call it propaganda when governments peddle "facts" which are demonstrably untrue. And yet the claim that without vaccination measles is a stalking killer is disseminated by both the Department of Health and most medical journalists, despite strong counter-evidence.

Pasteur, Robert Koch and others focused on the bacteria that caused infections, which medicine then tried to zap. Most anti-vaccinators argue that the host, ie the body, is as important as the infecting germ. Starting from a quite different paradigm, they prefer to nourish the body's own immune system, which vaccination (they maintain) impairs.

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