Talk:National Vaccine Information Center

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[edit] External links

I've trimmed the list because there's nothing about the Simpsonwood conference or the other two links that makes them more relevant to our article on the NVIC than any of the other (scores of) articles on list of vaccine topics.

It slants our coverage to single those articles out as particularly relevant or important with respect to the NVIC when, frankly, they're not. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 01:13, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Criticism

That seems an odd section - what does it mean? Midgley 23:10, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

I've removed it. It seems odd that the president would be criticising the org for its aims... and it is totally unreferenced...

"

Criticism

Critics contend that the organization represents industry interests rather than consumer interests. Most prominent among the critics are Harris Coulter, Ph.D., and Barbara Fisher, who coauthored DPT: A Shot in the Dark (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985; Warner, 1986; Avery, 1991). [1] " Midgley 08:55, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

http://health.consumercide.com/vacc-cameron.html (the reference above) has a bit of everything...

"Coulter's premise that overcoming childhood diseases constitutes important stages in the development of a robust, adult immune system and that bombarding an infant's immature immune system with live viruses actually can do more harm than good."

IE natural viruses like Measles are beneficial - an argument that embarasses even some antivaccinationists - but the attenuated, less virulent virus is harmful.

This seems intrinsically unlikely, on the one ground that it would be very improbable that if one virus is good and another similar one is bad we manage to always get the vaccine virus to be bad when the wild virus is good; and on the other that we are not offered any indication of who the poor unfortunates are who naturally failed to catch the disease and this progress in their development. The science fiction author Larry Niven posits in his novel Protector that there is a third stage to homo sapiens, but that this relies upon genetic material only found in a virus. It is a good story. While some viruses may be descended from us, and other be bound into our genome, and retro-viruses and Herpes can build themselves into our cells and persist, there is no indication that those who are not infected by them are missing out on anything. Midgley 09:39, 23 May 2006 (UTC)