Quotes from Paul A. Offit

Vaccines are not traditionally big money makers. They're given once or a few times in one's life, so they're never going to be blockbusters.

For most mothers, vaccinations become a matter of faith - faith in pharmaceutical companies, faith in public health officials - and I think there's been an erosion of faith.

I've never seen this level of anger at parents who've chosen not to vaccinate their children.

If you've had a cough that lasted weeks, a cough that just doesn't seem to go away, chances are it was pertussis.

History is the error we are forever correcting." —Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves, but it does not follow that they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children.

The trouble with the world is not that people know too little," wrote Mark Twain, "it's that they know so many things that ain't so.")

While Galileo was a rebel, not all rebels are Galileo"—

Any group that allows children to die unnecessarily is sinister. And if these groups invoked the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster instead of God, their children would likely be put in foster care and their adults in an institution. But because they claim to act in the name of God, public officials often turn a blind eye. Another

Clearly the use of a vaccine in the present does not cause the one who is immunized to share in the immoral intention or action of those who carried out the abortion in the past. Human history is filled with injustice. Acts of wrongdoing in the past regularly rebound to the benefit of descendents who had no hand in the original crimes. It would be a high standard indeed if we were to require all benefits that we receive in the present to be completely free of every immorality in the past.

Mice lie and monkeys exaggerate," says University of Pennsylvania vaccine researcher David Weiner.

On January 1, 2004, Denmark introduced legislation to restrict trans fats to no more than 2 percent of the total fat in any food. Consumption of trans fats fell from 4.5 grams a day per person in 1975 to 2.2 grams in 1993 to 1.5 grams in 1995 to almost 0 grams by 2005. By 2010, the incidence of heart disease and related deaths in Denmark had dropped 60 percent.

Four states prohibited the marriage of alcoholics, 17 prohibited the marriage of epileptics, and 41 prohibited the marriage of those deemed feebleminded or insane. By the mid-1930s, America was the world leader in banned marriages. (Marriage restriction laws weren't declared unconstitutional until 1967.)

Subjects were given vitamin E, beta-carotene, both, or neither. The results were clear: those taking vitamins and supplements were more likely to die from lung cancer or heart disease than those who didn't take them—the opposite of what researchers had anticipated.

In 1999, Daniel Salmon and co-workers from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found that the risk of contracting measles in five- to nine-year-olds whose parents had chosen not to vaccinate them was one hundred and seventy times greater than for vaccinated children.

But when Samuel Berkovic finally found the answer to the question of what had actually caused the problem, no one noticed. Not a single newspaper, magazine, or radio or television program carried the story.

Too much of a good thing can be wonderful," said West, who was talking about sex, not vitamins.) Second,

It was in that way that she has best served God.

Jonas Salk tested early preparations of his polio vaccine in retarded children at the Polk State School outside of Pittsburgh. At the time of Salk's experiments, no one in the government, the public, or the media objected to such testing. Everyone did it. Hilary Koprowski, working for the pharmaceutical company Lederle Laboratories, put his experimental live polio vaccine into chocolate milk and fed it to several retarded children in Petaluma, California,

Today we see studies on mentally retarded children as monstrous.

Like Mendelsohn, Stewart believed the decline in pertussis in the United Kingdom had nothing to do with the vaccine; it was simply a matter of improved sanitation.

That's the problem with vaccines. When they work, absolutely nothing happens. Nothing. Parents go on with their lives, not once thinking that their child was saved from meningitis caused by Hib or from liver cancer caused by hepatitis B or from fatal pneumonia caused by pneumococcus or from paralysis caused by polio. We live in a state of blissful denial.

Everything has a price; the only question is how big.

All horror movies start the same way. Whether the scene is an abandoned cabin, a dark alley, or a peaceful cottage, one line of dialogue, quietly uttered five minutes before the carnage starts, is inevitable: "Did you hear something?