And Dr. - you have yet to share your thoughts about your peer Dr. Humphries’ view regarding polio. Was hoping for some intellectual honesty on your part regarding her sentiment and the logic/reason she uses to fuel it.
Interested to see if you're as objective as you claim to be.
I've finally gotten to trying to read the literature cited by Dr. Humphries. Here's the list that's used to support her thesis...
[1] Statement from Clinton R. Miller, Intensive Immunization Programs, May 15th and 16th, 1962. Hearings before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce House of Representatives, 87th congress, second session on H.R. 10541.
[2] Meier, P. 1978. “The biggest public health experiment ever: The 1954 trial of the Salk poliomyelitis vaccine.” Statistics: A Guide to the Unknown, Ed. J. M. Tanur, el al., pp. 3-15. San Francisco: Holden Day.
[3] Scobey, R. 1952. “The poison cause of poliomyelitis and obstructions to its investigation.” Arch. Pediatr. April;69(4):172-93.
[4] Goldman.2003.”What was the cause of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s paralytic illness?” J Med Biog, 11:233-240.
[5] Opening brief of Defendant and Appellant Cutter Laboratories Gottsdanker v. Cutter Laboratories (1960) 182 Cal. App.2d 602 pp. 31-33.
It's not really clear what the thesis of Humphries is as there seems to be an attack on vaccination in general and a very poor understanding of the disease poliomyelitis. It is very clear that the highly contagious poliovirus causes poliomyelitis, a form of acute flaccid paralysis. This indeed became painfully obvious in the Cutter incident when the manufacturers failed to follow the protocols put forward by the scientist that developed the vaccine, which resulted in a failure to inactivate the virus during vaccine manufacture. As a result many kids contracted polio.
It is well known that other viruses can cause acute flaccid paralysis but not to the levels of polio and, if memory serves me correctly, is reversible, which is typically not the case for polio. Again, the polio vaccine has withstood the test of time. There is a gargantuan amount of scientific data that supports the role of poliovirus in disease and the efficacy of the vaccine.
Let me focus on the citations. I could not access any of them directly so I cannot comment on their content, which is frustrating. What I did manage to get hold of was an excerpt from the second reference...
http://www.stat.luc.edu/StatisticsfortheSciences/MeierPolio.htm
Table 1 is from the original research article and clearly demonstrates the efficacy of the polio vaccine in an unprecedented case controlled study in 1954. The data are very tight for a vaccine that was in the preliminary stages of development.
The data on the majority of vaccines is very tight. Regardless of the concerns around vaccination it is a safer alternative that being exposed to the agent that causes the disease. There are a lot of nuances in infectious diseases that are being used to nullify the effectiveness of vaccination.
As an aside, smallpox is not the only deadly pathogen that has been eradicated from the earth by vaccination. Have you ever heard on Rinderpest? It was a devastating infection of livestock that could kill up to 90% of the animals infected. Here's a link...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderpest
Without the process of vaccination we would still be facing this scourge in Africa, Asia and Europe. Thanks to the success of vaccination this disease no longer happens. Importantly, this disease was caused by a morbillivirus, which is the same type of virus that causes measles. Vaccination eradicated measles from the USA. Vaccination simply works.
Should we be concerned about childhood vaccination? No. Both Wakefield and Humphries raise arguments against vaccination that have either been looked at a long time ago already or have been addressed in extensive recent studies. What both Humphries and Wakefield do not provide is compelling evidence, numbers, that support their ideas. If there were numerical evidence to support their ideas I very much doubt we would be debating this on BARF.