Dear Editor, Capital District Parent Pages:
I wanted to comment on your recent article on vaccines and whether to immunize children. While I greatly appreciated the author interviewing a pediatrician and a school nurse for their perspectives, I thought the article gave too much credence to the parent who opted not to immunize her three children.
By providing the parent such a public forum to unequivocally state her views, yet not specifying how or where she studied the effects of vaccines on humans (except to note she has been studying this for “many years”) gave her undeserved equal footing with two medical professionals. Given the British Medical Journal’s recent retraction of its earlier published study on the link between autism and the MMR vaccine and investigative reporting documenting how Dr. Wakefield manipulated his data in this study, I wish the article had been more careful in its portrayal of this subject.
Although parents have a right to their own viewpoints, this mom’s breezy and very selfish dismissal of the potential risks that unvaccinated children impose upon the community caused me (a mother of two young children) great concern.
Thank you.
Jodi Boyle