Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill

Vaccinations are now the victims of their own success.

Due the growth of the number of unvaccinated children over the past few years in Europe, the herd immunity – whereby chains of infection are more able to be disrupted when large numbers of a population are immune to a disease – of the general population has been lost. As a result, those too young to be vaccinated are at significantly greater risk of being infected.

If you don’t vaccinate you’re risking the health of your kids and that of all the kids around you. The more people that fail to vaccinate, the greater this risk becomes.

The email address associated with Pulpmovies.com is published on that website and has been for the past ten years. Looking at the volume of spam that is fired at that particular inbox, I acknowledge that publishing this email address in a bot-readable manner was a mistake. I also think that it’s now too late to remove it from the site and too much hassle to change it. Consequently, I now push all my Pulpmovies email through Gmail and leave it to Google to stop the spam.

Normally the Chocolate Factory does an excellent job but the occasional oddity does get through. Like the one that turned up today.

But first, some background.

Earlier this month, CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta sat down with Bill Gates who was at the World Economic Forum in Davos to push his mission of eradicating polio by 2012. Gates, through his foundation, also pledged $10 billion to provide vaccinations to children around the world within a decade. When Gupta asked Gates about alleged autism-vaccine connection, the billionaire philanthropist’s remarks were both outspoken and accurate.

Well, Dr. Wakefield has been shown to have used absolutely fraudulent data. He had a financial interest in some lawsuits, he created a fake paper, the journal allowed it to run. All the other studies were done, showed no connection whatsoever again and again and again. So it’s an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn’t have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts — you know, they, they kill children. It’s a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important.

You can watch the complete interview here.

So to the spam that made it through the filter. Anti-vaccination groups are outraged that Bill Gates has had the temerity to point out that spreading FUD and telling outright lies to concerned parents kills babies.

At the time of writing, the Jenny McCarthy Body Count has identified 74899 vaccine preventable illnesses and 656 vaccine preventable death that have occued in the US since Jenny McCarthy (a particularly loud and dim spokeswoman for the anti-vaccination movement) started spreading bogus claims.

If the numbers don’t move you then Dana McCaffery‘s story will. Go read it.

There is no link between vaccination and autism. People, such as Dr. Wakefield, who use fraudulent data to try and claim otherwise in order to profit from parents’ fears are despicable.

Anti-vaccination campaigners kill children.