Hi Amy and Douglas,
As a GP I am expected to vaccinate every child. Public health needs to provide the reassurance that on balance their children (the people that I am expected to safeguard) after vaccination are not more at risk to develop asthma, eczema, hayfever, inflammatory bowel disease, autoimmune diseases, ADHD, depression or pervasive developmental disorders.
A better question is what evidence does public health have to prove to the parents and me as GP, that taking an acute infectious disease and life long NCDs the mort/morb balance is favourable - in view of the endemic increase of all of those NCDs mentioned above?
I do not want to compare myself with Semmelweis but I worked in a practice where the population was less keen on vaccination and parents opted to vaccinate only at one year old and with fewer vaccinations. What I observed was that there are less NCDs in the children in this population.
Furthermore I work in the OOH (Out of Hours service) of the area that also covers this practice. Hardly any patients of this practice contact the OOH. I hardly every see any needing a nebuliser.
If I was public health I would jump on this and do research! As a Public Health specialist I would take pride in keeping the population healthy, and do any kind of research to do my job for society properly. Unfortunately, just like in Semmelweis's time, there seems to be an overbearing tendency to question people if stepping out of the box: "where is your evidence" and subsequently don't interact because they want to keep their job. The health of children seems less important? To me it seem that this area of research (NCD/vaccination) doesn't feature on any conferences of public health, WHO, Unicef or GaviAlliance.
It is unthinkable not to discuss possible side effects when it concerns adults, take statins, HRT, COC, but when it concerns children nobody seems to care?
To actually answer your question "where is your evidence", did you take time to read my link of 2012 and did you read it with interest or did you scanned it through to check if it sounded acceptable - rather than be stimulated to help think about whether vaccines are causing the endemic increase in NCD. This is important because I believe it not an academic exercise but the most pressing humanitarian research topic of our time. http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e3769/rr/593438
Of course I am emotionally involved because I handle the needle and syringe, so therefore I value your scientific input and look forward to both your thoughts!
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