Having been accused of promoting conspiracy theories regarding vaccination and receiving a notice from the moderators that I would be banned if I posted anything additional that was deemed CT, I took a long hard look at my diaries and came to the conclusion that I needed to apologize for the following:
In a recent post on vaccinations I conflated two ideas in my diaries and in doing so published a headline that was misleading. The misleading information could have very well caused fear in others -- fear I experienced first hand as a parent of a child born in 1999 - and for that I am sorry. Here is what I knew and what was an unsupported leap:
In 1999 public health officials deemed that vaccinations should be made in preservative free single dose vials to avoid giving babies the preservative. This was supported by the citations. The multi-dose vials that contained the preservative remained on the shelves and were administered until 2002. This fact was also supported by the citations. There was inadequate support for the headline and some of the body of the diary which said that "therefore multi-dose vials were unsafe." I did not have a citation to a study that said multi-dose vials were unsafe. That was wrong and I am sorry.
I was trying to make the point that public health officials bore some amount of the blame for the frayed trust between part of the skeptical public and the government by failing to recall the multi-dose vials after it was determined that another method should be used. To some parents at that time - I was one - this definitively contributed to a failure to ameliorate the fear during a period when neurological and auto-immune disorders were first spiking. That was my opinion. Failure to recall contributed to lack of trust. But I stated it as fact that multi-dose vials were unsafe. I was wrong to do that.
In the end I stumbled and bungled my way forward and my child was vaccinated but I remained empathetic to those parents who have strong misgivings watching that first vial being drained into their healthy baby. I think public health officials could have done a better job with those misgivings and the lack of recall didn't help. At the time, a full 25% of parents questioned the number or the schedule of vaccinations. How many of them were people who would have questioned any vaccine, I do not know. But the open questions about why this vaccine and not that one and why this schedule and not another were very much a part of the mix. Answers were hard to come by. That's my opinion and my experience.
Then again I have never accepted the entirety of what government says. Heck, I work for the government. We tell the people out here that the water is 100% safe. Of course what's also true is that our regulations allow for quite a number of contaminants to be present in that safe water. We don't review those details with members of the public unless they demand it. For me, I use a filter. So should you. (and that's also my opinion)