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| Joined: | Mon Nov 21st, 2005 |
| Location: | California USA |
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“This decline in rates of certain disorders, correlated roughly with socioeconomic circumstances, is merely the most important happening in the history of of the health of man, yet we have only the vaguest and most general notions about how it happened and by what mechanisms socioeconomic improvement and decreased rates of certain diseases run in parallel.”
"Luckily for us, Dr. Kass' speech that day has been saved for posterity, as it was printed in its entirety in a medical journal. In fact, it's a journal that Dr. Kass himself founded, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, and his speech is called, "Infectious Disease and Social Change." There are a number of things about Dr. Kass' speech that I found breathtaking, especially given that he was the President of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Namely:
"1. He never referred to vaccines as "mankind's greatest invention" or one of the other many hyperbolic ways vaccines are described all the time by vaccine promoters in the press today. Vaccines weren't responsible for saving "millions of lives" in the United States, as Dr. Kass well knew.
"2. In fact, he never gave vaccines much credit AT ALL for the developed world's dramatic mortality decline. Which makes sense, because none of the data he had would have supported that view. Which made me wonder, "has anyone tried to put the contribution of vaccines to the decline in human mortality in the 20th century in context?" Said differently, is there any data that measures exactly how much impact vaccines had in saving humanity? Yes, indeed there is."
http://vaccinesafetycommission.org/pdfs/Kass%201971.pdf