Mary Holland

People who follow the antivaccine movement might remember that around this time last year, Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA), a particularly antiscience legislator who appears to be trying to take up the antivaccine mantle left behind when Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) retired at the end of the last session of Congress. Given that he now chairs the House committee that Burton once chaired, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Issa decided to take up that mantle by following Burton's lead when he was the chair and scheduled an antivaccine hearing last November, right after…
Antivaccinationists endanger public health. They deny to high heaven that that is what they do, but they are deluding themselves. Their fear mongering about vaccines, in which vaccines in general or specific ingredients are portrayed as causing autism and a wide variety of chronic diseases, despite study after study failing to find even a whiff of a hint of a correlation between vaccines or vaccine ingredients and autism, have resulted in precipitous declines in vaccination rates in some areas and contributed to an increase in the distrust of vaccines by parents. In the US, although overall…