A Critical Look at: Why Dr Suzanne Humphries, an anti-vaccine activist, is lying to you about measles
A friend of mine, who just had a baby, recently sent me a link to an article titled: Why Dr Suzanne Humphries, an anti-vaccine activist, is lying to you about measles and asked me for my opinion about it.
I have had a few conversations with him about the risks of vaccinating or not in the past and obviously he was doing some of his own research. So it was exciting to review a article biased more towards the pro-vaccine side to see if their arguments made any sense.
Source
My own opinion is that parents should be able to make their own informed decision about what goes into their child's body and then be willing to accept the consequences of that choice. I very much dislike it when people are given half-truths and then manipulated into making a decision based on the practitioner's bias. Hopefully I am not also guilty of this when explaining treatment options to patients in my own practice.
There is no 100% safe choice in the vaccine debate.
There are risks to both sides. It is just a matter of figuring out what risks are worth it for you to take with your child's health and let you sleep at night.
What gets lost in the debate is what those real risks are and the most appropriate ways to mitigate these risks.
The target of the article, Dr. Suzanne Humphries, is a large voice in the anti-vaccine movement and someone who I have tremendous respect for. Having watched a number of her youtube videos, (this one is my favourite) I have come to appreciate her passion for the well referenced information that she gives.
Dr. Humphries was a medical kidney specialist before she started speaking out about vaccines so has a solid background in science and is as evidence-based as they come. The fact that she gave up such a high paying job (I think I remember her saying she was making $350,000 in a video) voluntarily to do what she is doing now should give her a lot of credibility for what she has to say and explains the passion for which she delivers it.
Being that the above article is obviously an attempt at character assassination of Dr. Humphries I figured that I would go through the article claim by claim to see if the author, Isabella B, has found any holes in the message that I had been hearing from Dr. Humphries.
The article hons in on Dr. Humphries's book Dissolving Illusions. It just so happens that I have read this book and have a personal copy so it should help me get context for the claims being made against Dr. Humphries. The article makes 11 different claims so I think that I will use each of those claims as a post and thoroughly examine them to be able to come up with a consensus on where the facts are in this part of the vaccination debate.
Hopefully you will be able to stick with me through the series and I promise I will get onto a different topic once finished.
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Thanks for reading and stay tuned.
Not saying anything against Suzanne Humphries, but once she started speaking out against vaccines, she would have lost her position and become unemployable eventually, such is the draconian nature of the medical system's response to any threat to their profitability. So yeah she may have given up her position voluntarily, but that's really a case of jumping before you are pushed in this case, sadly.
The interesting thing I find is that she is still maintaining her medical license. If she hasn't lost it I don't see why she would have lost her hospital job unwillingly.
https://www.pfr.maine.gov/ALMSOnline/ALMSQuery/ShowDetail.aspx?TOKEN=D3CA6F467B5417B98FBAF9818421841348DA7E8DA8553B1A
I would say that it would be a lot harder to take her medical license away from her than to simply fire her from a job. That would involve an actual investigation and they would have to prove malpractice of some kind. As she has done nothing wrong and has actually helped save lives, that's probably a can of worms they don't want to open. It might actually wake up more medical professionals who have some clout, to what is going on. These people aren't stupid.
Do you have any evidence to support the claims made by Suzanne?
Thanks for the reminder to actually follow up with the posts that I said that I would make. I have been fairly busy recently and was waiting to get my copy of the book back before starting to write on this topic.
This is very timely. The issue of vaccination has been one of the concerns here in the Philippines especially the issue of Dengvaxia controversy. (http://cnnphilippines.com/news/2017/12/09/The-Dengvaxia-controversy.html)
It's alarming how the government put the lives of hundreds of people at risk with this.
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