Michael Specter Quotes

I don't care if people get angry about that, believing the rubbish that vaccinations cause trouble or make the child worse or something. That's not what I believe. I think it's important for me to say.

I talked to lots of people who are vaccine-hesitant, and I actually was one myself until I got further into this project, and most of them actually are in my demographic: so well-educated people with advanced degrees who are upper middle-class and have read quite a bit on the subject.

I'm very pro vaccine. I get all six of my kids vaccinated. I believe vaccines save millions of lives, and people ought to be getting vaccinated.

Vaccines don't cause autism. Vaccines, instead, prevent disease. Vaccines have wiped out a score of formerly deadly childhood diseases. Vaccine skepticism has helped to bring some of those diseases back from near extinction.

On the pro-vaccine side - and not everyone does this, but I saw it enough for it to make me really uncomfortable - is a tendency to accuse people who are wary of vaccination of being stupid and not understanding science.

Having children made us look differently at all these things that we take for granted, like taking your child to get a vaccine against measles or polio.

Vaccinations absolutely work, and have dramatically decreased rates of childhood diseases.

Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them. It's a simple message parents need to keep hearing.

Childhood vaccines are one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. Indeed, parents whose children are vaccinated no longer have to worry about their child's death or disability from whooping cough, polio, diphtheria, hepatitis, or a host of other infections.

If you give us a safe vaccine, we'll use it. It shouldn't be polio versus autism.

Why do other first world countries give children so many fewer vaccines than we do? Vaccines save lives, but might be harming some children. Is moderation such a terrible idea?

I think public awareness of how good vaccines are for kids and how they are good for public health is a great idea.

It is true that there are some parents who have concerns about vaccines, but while we hear about these concerns a lot in the media, I don't want people to think that the majority of parents out there do not believe in vaccines and then most kids aren't getting vaccinated. In fact, it's exactly the opposite.

I think children should be vaccinated because that affects the health of all the other children.

I think that people's resistance to vaccination isn't going to disappear until we address some of the nonmedical reasons for that resistance and people's discomfort and distrust of the government. That's bigger than what most medical professionals can handle.

The thing is I think vaccines are one of the greatest medical breakthroughs that we have. I'm a big fan and a great fan of the history of the development of the smallpox vaccine, for example.

You can't save kids just with vaccines.

I think that protecting children at the age where they're most vulnerable against diseases that are highly contagious is prudent.

I'm very much in favor of vaccinations, and I've been very vocal about that because it's insane to forgo this.

People think they're making individual decisions for themselves and their family not to get vaccinated. It's not just an individual choice - you're a hazard to society.

When I first went public with my son Evan's story, I just planned to talk about the 'R' word - Recovery. But soon I was spending most my time talking about the 'V' word - vaccines.

The truth is, there is no link between vaccines and autism. Vaccines are incredibly important.

What I saw when I was doing research is that in pursuit of a middle ground, people will kind of split the difference between the two extremes that they're hearing. And I think what's problematic is that people are seeing vaccinating on schedule, on time, as an extreme position.

In some areas, immunity has been eroded so much that the child who's not vaccinated is now actually more vulnerable to the complications of infectious diseases.

Vaccine conspiracies, like so much modern cult conspiracy culture, perpetuates itself and lives on indefinitely thanks to the community-building and archiving of the Internet.