text: Reason.com's Ronald Bailey raises the question of whether parents should have the right to refuse to vaccinate their children. Bailey thinks not, arguing that people who do so effectively "assert[] that they have the right to 'swing' their microbes at other people."
  The title of this post comes from the article, which begins:
  The University of Pittsburgh's Project Tycho database, launched last week, quantifies the prevalence of infectious disease since 1888 in the United States. Drawing on Project Tycho data, a November 28 New England Journal of Medicinearticle concluded that vaccinations since 1924 until now prevented 103 million cases of polio, measles, rubella, mumps, hepatitis A, diphtheria, and pertussis. While the NEJM article did not calculate the number of deaths avoided as a result of vaccination, one of the study's authors estimates that number is between three and four million.
  http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/civil_rights/2013/12/refusing-vaccination-puts-others-at-risk.html
  As a child in the early fifties I received one of the first rounds of polio shots. From that I contracted polio. They all agreed that it was from the vaccine. I got over it. They were glad. So am I. But, you know, when these herd minders tell you to take a shot or eat a pill to preserve the herd, think about preserving yourself.
  Posted by: Liberty1st | Dec 7, 2013 9:18:13 PM
  Oh, avoid doctors as long as you can. I am 80 and have not been to one since the early 1950s. Lucky me.