Fooling Ourselves: On the Fundamental Value of Vaccines

Driving a train of unstoppable logic, Greg Beattie smashes through one idol after another in this Vaccine Age, caring for neither academic credentials or haughty statements issued from on high by regulatory bodies. His main tool employed is the humble anachronism, that vaccines could not have been the source for the first world’s health improvements precisely because they were either late comers (e.g. measles, polio, and pertussis) or no-shows (e.g. typhoid and scarlet fever). What did lower mortality and morbidity was good nutrition, sewerage and plumbing technology, and personal hygiene, the main things lacking in the Third World and which cannot be fixed by needles. Little-known problems such as disease incidence versus reporting, and doctor reporting participation and bias are well thought out showing how alleged threat of disease is magnified by orders of magnitude. It is clear that as well as being unsafe, vaccines are also ineffective. If you believe vaccination has saved more lives and prevented more suffering than any other medical intervention in our recent history... that vaccines were magic bullets that saved us from our infectious past... that if we all stopped using them tomorrow, deaths would soar... then this book is essential reading. "Fooling ourselves: on the fundamental value of vaccines" examines these beliefs and concludes, using official data, simple logic and illustrations, that we have indeed been fooling ourselves for a very long time. Blow by blow, the book de-constructs the "foundation" upon which vaccines have held their court for ages. It crushes our fundamental belief. It then searches for real evidence of value. The results are startling. The author demonstrates that its supposed benefit is not borne out by the figures.