She [Mary Tocco] writes:
"We have protected the rights of parents in Michigan since defeating a bill back in September 1995 that would have eliminated the philosophical exemption to vaccinations and are a voice for thousands of parents who support transparent information about the known safety risks of vaccines. MOM encourages informed vaccine decisions and do not tell people how to decide or whether or not to vaccinate."
Philosophical exemption simply means anyone can simply choose not to vaccinate their children and still place them in public school. Keep in mind, vaccines are only mandatory in the US in that children need them to enter public school. Parents can always opt out and either homeschool or send their kids to private school that doesn’t require vaccination.
No one disagrees with medical exemptions from vaccines. Religious exemptions are controversial, and I won’t delve into that topic here. The real issue is, if states allow for any non-medical exemption, how difficult is it to obtain? Philosophical exemptions are all about lowering the bar and making it easy.
Saying that the group “support transparent information about the known safety risks of vaccines,” implies that this is an issue. If you want transparent scientific information about vaccine risks, ask your doctor, or go to the
CDC website. Look up any vaccine and they will list all the known side effects and their incidence right there.
Anti-vaccine groups pay lip service to informed decisions and transparency, but actually they are promoting misinformation and so are actually working against informed consent. They are muddying the waters with nonsense, cherry picking, distortion of facts, and outright lies.
She writes:
"The authors claim that Michigan’s unvaccinated rates are a health risk. I have not seen any studies proving that those who are unvaccinated or lacking in all of their vaccines have shown a reduction in health."
Then you have not been looking.
I reviewed the literature here. What published studies show is that vaccinated children are different from unvaccinated children in one way – they have fewer vaccine-preventable diseases. That is what vaccines are supposed to do. There are also countless studies looking at individual vaccines, showing that they reduce the risk of contracting the disease they are meant to prevent.
She goes on:
"It is a fact that when a child recovers from these infectious illness, they obtain life-long immunity as a benefit."
This is a distortion. Not all infections produce life-long immunity. Length of immunity varies. The same is true for vaccination – length of immunity varies. Researchers track how long the immunity from vaccines last, and schedule booster shots accordingly.
Sometimes immunity from surviving the disease lasts longer than the vaccine, because the length and intensity of exposure to antigens is greater, but at what cost? Vaccine-preventable infections are not all benign. Many can cause serious permanent harm or even death. If nothing else, who wants to be miserably sick for weeks. The whole point of vaccines is to trigger immunity without the disease. If you take a risk vs benefit approach, the benefit of vaccines vastly outweighs the risk, perhaps by more than any other medical intervention.
She digs in:
"The science “is not settled” on vaccine safety or efficacy."
This is a lie. The science is absolutely settled. Vaccines are safe and effective. “Safe” does not mean zero risk – life does not come with zero risk, ever. It means they are relatively safe, and that benefit outweighs risk.
As evidence to support her misinformation she writes:
"The United States Vaccine Court has settled over 85 cases where children are injured with neurological injuries from vaccines since 2000."
This is another distortion. The vaccine court does not determine if vaccines caused the reported injuries.
They only determine if compensation is appropriate, based on their rules which are designed to favor the claimant. They err way on the side of compensating sick children, and they don’t force them to prove cause and effect. This is, therefore, not a good line of evidence that vaccines cause harm.
And of course, no one denies that rare (on the order of magnitude of one in a million) cases of vaccine serious side effects do occur.
If Tocco is going to cite the vaccine court, however, then she should note that the court did make a ruling on the association of vaccines and autism, hearing the best cases the anti-vaccine crowd had to offer,
and rejected their claims.She continues:
"As I travel the country speaking with parents, the #1 concern is vaccine ingredients. Many are not meant to eat and yet we inject them via vaccination!"
This is naked fearmongering with the “toxin gambit.” David Gorski has
deconstructed this myth many times.