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Letter to Howard Block, the lone board member of the Reed Union School District who opposed a suggested member to support elimination of belief waivers from vaccinations.
Letter to Howard Block, the lone board member of the Reed Union School District who opposed a suggested member to support elimination of belief waivers from vaccinations.
Letter to Howard Block, the lone board member of the Reed Union School District who opposed a suggested member to support elimination of belief waivers from vaccinations.
To: hblock@reedschools.org Bcc: , t Howard Block Board Member Reed Union School District Dear Mr. Block: When faced with the testimony of Rhett Krawitt, a very real little boy whose health would be severely impacted if he were to be exposed to measles, you expressed your opposition to the measure he proposed. In fact, you were the lone member of the Reed school board who did so, and your reason was that you have a "small doubt" based on "anecdotes" and that what you wanted was "more data" on vaccine safety. I thought I would ease your mind, assuming you have an actual interest in learning about this issue rather than blocking it for the sake of some unstated personal agenda. First of all, here is the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' fact sheet on vaccine injury: http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/index.html Now, there is a lot of reading material there, which can seem overwhelming. I have heard that people resistant to the idea of vaccination also don't like to have facts thrown at them, because it makes them feel defensive. However, as a member of your school's board, I do hope you can soldier past your feelings of defensiveness to actively investigate the assertion you make on behalf of a large community of children (not cows). Anyway, to make it easier for you, I have pulled out a few facts and figures for you: Since the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was put into effect in 1989, there have been some 13,804 petitions filed. Of those petitions, a total of 3,937 were found to be entitled to compensation. The process of applying is not onerous; the effects of vaccine injury are immediate and very quantifiable, and very real. That breaks down to about 153 certified vaccine injuries per year. I don't know how many are injuries and how many are deaths. That information is actually within the report, but I personally don't want or need to break it down; you're the one questioning the data, so I encourage you to dig deeper. Okay, so we have 153 vaccine injuries in the U.S. per year. Now, going back to before the measles vaccine was put into wide use in 1962: According to "Measles Elimination in the United States," a paper published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases in 2004 (http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S1.long), before the vaccine more than 90 percent of the population got measles. "Although most patients recovered without permanent sequelae, the high number of cases each year made measles a significant cause of serious morbidity and mortality." Now, by the late '50s, though most people got measles, measles-related deaths had decreased, probably because of improved health care across the board. Even so, "an average of 450 measles-related deaths were reported each year." That's deaths -- not injuries; per year, an average of 150,000 patients had respiratory complications and 4,000 had encephalitis, with about 48,000 measles patients hospitalized per year. 48,000 hospitalizations, 450 deaths, per year from measles. 153 injuries per year from vaccines. So is this sufficient date to ease your mind, or are you still opposed to the measure that would eliminate "philosophical" exemptions from the measles vaccines that have already resulted in outbreaks from a formerly-eradicated disease, and which, at this point, threaten herd immunity? Should you be mistrustful of the federal government and the CDC, here are some numbers from the World Health Organization: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs286/en/. Should you be one of those folks who says only Africans die of measles because they don't have adequate health care, please pay special attention to the WHO rates of infection and complications in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain. I would love to hear back from you on this issue. Sincerely yours, ____________________ Amy Keyishian Richmond, CA 94805