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The best my wife and I found was a doctor who wouldn't harass us. I had one doctor start talking about villages in Africa and Autism... He first made a glib claim about "no dangers" and adjusted his argument when I called BS.
In the hospital it was even worse, with 4 different doctors/interns coming at different times to "discuss" the issues with us. The discussions were pretty much a brief primer on how vaccines are "safe and effective" and then became hostile when I discussed AEs and questioned the logic of my newborn needing Hep B shot...
As to the question of why a majority of professionals buy in to vaccines, I think it is actually simple. They were all taught that vaccines saved the world and are safe and effective. They are taught about the "scourge of measles!" and how modern medicine saved the day, which is partly true...
In addition, students are more suggestible than the public at large, due in part to their enormous investment in their training.
Besides, with all the vitriol on the pro-vax side, I don't see many students asking many questions counter to the prevailing beliefs. That is what interests me, that basic scientific questions cannot be raised without an angry hoard harassing the hell out of you.
I have run into a few intelligent posters, who at least were capable of controlling their obvious contempt, but otherwise you pretty much get what you see in this very thread.
For the record, I have found you to be respectful in our discussion and I appreciate it.
Measles is a good example, because most vaccine preventable diseases are similar in their presentation, both clinically and epidemiologically. But I would agree, discussion of vaccines should be done one at a time, not as just one intervention.
Of course I don't want to revisit disease outbreaks, however, I think there is middle ground between 1% of the diseased having severe reactions (or less if you use more recent data) and vaccinating hundreds of millions of people. And for the record, measles, mumps, and rubella don't scare me and shouldn't scare you. Scarlet fever is one of the dreaded diseases that a vaccine was never made for (yet it still declined in similar fashion to the others).
As for smallpox, I challenge you to provide me with one source to support that vaccination eliminated smallpox. This is the claim that really piqued my interest in the topic, and in pro-vax propaganda in general. In all the time I have been debating this topic, nobody has been able to provide data to support this oft-repeated claim. Without going into depth, it makes no sense that vaccine coverage was sufficient to do the job and there are examples of non-vaccinated populations who enjoyed similar declines to those vaccinated.
Once we can actually get an accurate number of vaccine related AEs then we can start to make the necessary analysis. That doesn't even speak to the unknown AE's that have potential to be seen in the future.
I will post a few sources when I get the time. Even vaccine proponents won't deny this, they will just minimize it. The reality is, science isn't quite sure why some people without antibodies don't get sick while others with antibodies do.
Because they are inadvertently spreading diseases and putting the young and frail at risk.
Mortality simply offers a better estimate of the data (flawed as this data itself is) than other complications do.
And I don't believe that the overwhelming majority of experts are fraudulent, I simply think that most are good students, and possibly a bit narcissistic.
My belief is that if a vaccine is proven to have caused harm, the manufacturer should be liable. I don't really care where the harm came from (contamination, poor vaccine design, etc.), the manufacturer is responsible for their product, period.
