Don’t be fooled on Question 1 

To the Editor;

We are in the middle of the misinformation age. The latest is the recent effort by a people’s veto group Reject Big Pharma to use the ploy of claiming that Big Pharma is behind the new law requiring vaccinations. I am writing to set the record straight. I have many beefs with Big Pharma, but they are not driving the law to require vaccination of children. Science is.

First, the facts about vaccination: The World Health Organization, the US Public Health Service, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the AMA and the CDC all recommend vaccinations worldwide for children to prevent diseases that are highly contagious, and cause severe illnesses and often death. These include diseases like polio, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough. Over the centuries, prior to vaccines, these diseases caused millions of people to suffer illness, disability and death. Several of these diseases have been nearly eliminated in the United States due to mandated childhood immunization programs. 

In 1950 two years before the polio vaccine was first produced, my mother contracted polio, a disease that profoundly affected her life and mine, as she was paralyzed when I was born. In 1952 the Salk polio vaccine was first produced and by 1979 polio was eliminated in the United States due to widespread childhood immunization. However, polio continues to exist in the world in places where vaccination is not as available. 

A similar story could be told of the decline in measles, whooping cough and other vaccine preventable diseases that infected, disabled and killed millions of people, mostly children, prior to the introduction of effective vaccines and have nearly been eliminated since the 1960s. However the rise in anti-vaccination proponents is threatening to reverse this success, as outbreaks are now occurring throughout Europe and in the United States of diseases that we thought had been eliminated, mostly in unvaccinated populations. As recently as 2018 in Italy there was a measles outbreak that resulted in 84,000 cases and 72 deaths, mostly children under 5. 

Vaccination is the only proven way to develop immunity to a disease other than to have the disease, and is much safer than the disease itself. 

Second, the facts about Big Pharma: while drug companies do make money from vaccines, they make up only about 2 percent of their total income worldwide, mostly because these low cost drugs are given to millions of people. If the drug companies really wanted to maximize their profits they would stop making vaccines entirely and just sell more drugs to treat the illnesses that would result. 

The development of vaccines in the past 60 years is one of the greatest triumphs of medical science in history. Do you want to risk your child being exposed to these deadly preventable infections? I urge you not to be fooled. Vote no on Question 1.

Lesley Fernow, MD

Dover-Foxcroft