Thirty-five years of medical practice have convinced me that all vaccines carry a significant risk of chronic disease that is inherent in the vaccination process and in fact central to how they work. Yet the growing concerns of parents and legislators and the media reports about them seldom elicit anything beyond automatic, scornful denials by medical and public health authorities alike. Reflecting on this discrepancy, the focal point of this essay, has also helped me appreciate how much the invisibility actually heightens the risk, and how intimately these phenomena are connected, like mirror-images of the same reality, so that it is wisest to study them together.
Since I am mainly a clinician, I will begin with a story. It concerns a twelve-year-old boy whom I know of solely from his mother’s letter, but her words are so heartfelt and so congruent with the rest of my experience that I cannot doubt their veracity:
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