Vaccinations
Having been completely ignorant about vaccines until my daughter was over two years old, I finally got around to investigating vaccines further and, based on Amazon book sales and Amazon customer reviews, I read the three books below. The first two, though outdated in some ways (one was printed in 2001 and the other in 2007), were still very helpful for me. They provided a broad overview of vaccines and key concerns surrounding them as well as statistics, trends and reviews of scientific data. Both of these books left me concerned, upset, and wanting more research / data that currently does not exist.
The last book, the most updated of the three (printed in 2008), provided a very different perspective, as the author is pro-vaccines. Through reading all three books, I was trying to filter out the scientific data — the facts. Throughout this site are notes from this approach.
- What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Children’s Vaccinations
- The Vaccine Book
- Autism’s False Prophets
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What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Children’s Vaccinations (2001) by Dr. Stephanie Cave
This was the first vaccine book that I read and, being completely ignorant, I appreciated the overview of the author provided on vaccines in general and which issues I should further investigate and consider.
Notes were taken on a number of vaccine subtopics but the key areas within which I took notes were:
- The Hygiene Hypothesis
- Vaccine Ingredients — Mercury
- Vaccine Safety Research
- Vaccine Side Effects — Asthma and Allergies
- Vaccine Side Effects — Juvenile Diabetes
- Vaccine Side Effects — Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)
The Vaccine Book (2007) by Dr. Robert Sears, M.D.
This was the second vaccine book that I read and it provided a helpful and different perspective than What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Children’s Vaccinations. Also, since The Vaccine Book was published in 2007, six years after What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Children’s Vaccinations (2001), The Vaccine Book provided an opinion that considered much more updated information, especially surrounding mercury.
Many of the notes I took from this book covered the following topics:
- Vaccine Ingredients
- Vaccine Efficacy
- Statistical Risk of a Severe Vaccine Reaction
- Statistical Risk of Suffering from a Severe Reaction from a Vaccine-Preventable Disease
- Vaccine Side Effects
- Minimize Vaccine Side Effects
Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure (2008) by Dr. Paul A. Offit, M.D.
This was the last book on vaccines that I read and it provided a very different perspective on vaccines. Although its focus is on the link between vaccines and autism, I found it very enlightening to read about the facts (scientific data) and what was being communicated to the public (such as how the media handled (or disregarded) the facts and how scientists behaved during this time).
Many of the notes I took from this book covered the following topics:
- Results of Vaccination Studies
- Vaccine Side Effects — Autism
- Vaccine Ingredients — Mercury, Aluminum, Animal and Human Tissues
