Letter

Learn from the past

Dear healthmatters — Magda Taylor’s attack on vaccination (An injection of doubt is required, issue 22) is mostly based on special pleading and careful selection of facts along the lines: ‘my grandfather smoked and drank until he was 100 so they must both be good for you’.

But she does manage to go one step further by claiming that ‘only a small number of children would develop a disease’ if vaccines were not available. Vaccination is obviously one of the main reasons why only a few children develop childhood diseases nowadays.

She has also forgotten the constant fear in which we all lived in the days before polio vaccination for example, with frequent panics leading to school and swimming bath closures.

The rare examples of vaccine damaged children rightly deserve our sympathy, but there can be no doubt of the overall benefit of vaccination to the vast majority of children and parents.