Choices: How The Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All Summary

In his book, Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All, Paul A. Offit, M.D. presents us with a thoroughly in-depth look behind the veil of the vaccine controversy. Specifically here in the United States. Offit starts us off with the history of vaccinations giving insights into not just their creation but the controversy that has surrounded them since the beginning. We learn how these questions around safety and personal rights started and who have been the major decision makers in history. We hear about the groups and people that support vaccinations and those that do not. Throughout the book, Offit’s opinion on the subject is clear. He believes that vaccines save lives and that those that oppose their use or even question them at all are to be classified as uninformed idiots. Beneath all the medical testimony and argued and refuted studies we come down the question of ethics. Do parents have the

John Salamone’s son was one of these children. His son received the vaccine in 1990 and “two weeks after the visit, the Salamones noticed something was wrong with their son” (Offit, 2011, 78). Salamone says, “Then we found out that there were a number of kids every year who were getting polio from this vaccine.” “Then we got mad, upset, when we found out that there were other options of polio vaccine out there” (Offit, 2011, p. 79). Salamone went after policy change and in 1998 as Offit (2011) notes, the Advisory Committee of Immunization Practices switched to the inactive form of the vaccine. It seems that it took far too many years, years in which children were getting polio from this vaccine, for these guidelines to change. This is enough to make any parent wary. Add to that anti-vaccine groups claiming that chemicals in vaccines can cause anything from autism to mad-cow disease and parents are now very