One might have hoped that when the issue of vaccinations was raised in the most recent Republican debate, the two medical doctors would have said, clearly and unambiguously, Full childhood vaccinations are good for the child and good for society. Adding, Childhood vaccination is not linked to autism. End of discussion.

Instead, we had retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson shilly-shallying around the issue, saying that while numerous studies haven’t demonstrated any vaccine-autism connection, certain vaccines—“those that would prevent death or crippling” are important, while others are not so important. Truth is, every vaccine is designed to prevent a potentially crippling or fatal disease. Guess he’s more into vote-getting than following his Hippocratic Oath.

Carson also pandered to anti-vaxxers by saying that there should be some discretion in the vaccination schedule. Discretion is exactly what is not warranted. By delaying the recommended full schedule of vaccinations, a parent is subjecting their infant to increased disease susceptibility. Delaying or denying a child’s vaccination has implications beyond the individual, of course, since it decreases the herd immunity of the whole population, allowing a disease to spread more easily. This is a particular concern for such vulnerable groups as pre-vaccinated infants, sick/elderly people, and those who have been vaccinated but are still susceptible (no vaccine is 100 percent effective).

Carson later said that infants are probably getting too many vaccines in too short a time – which is patently false. Infants’ immune systems encounter far more antigens (the active content of vaccines) in their daily lives than exist in vaccines. Again, delaying vaccines only increases the infant’s vulnerable exposure time.

(It may or may not be relevant that Carson’s a creationist.)

Eye surgeon Rand Paul echoed Carson’s spread-out-the-vaccines message. “Even if the science doesn’t say bunching them up is a problem, I ought to have the right to spread out my vaccines out a little bit, at the very least.” You do have that right, Rand. Everyone does, no one’s forced to get vaccines on schedule – even though it is a danger to your kid and to society at large if you don’t.

Mike Huckabee (whose credentials don’t include an MD) added fuel to the dangerous fire by saying, about vaccines, that “…there are maybe some controversies about autism…” Huckabee would be hard-put to find any backing for “controversies” in the medical and scientific community.

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This is probably ancient news to you, but in case: The myth of a vaccine-autism link was started by one of my countrymen, a British doctor and researcher by the name of Andrew Wakefield, with a fraudulent 1998 paper in the medical newsletter The Lancet claiming a connection between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. Other researchers couldn’t reproduce his claims or find any credible link, and ten of his 12 co-authors withdrew support for the paper after a newspaper reporter revealed that Wakefield had been secretly paid by litigants trying to sue vaccine drug companies. Wakefield was subsequently stripped of his medical credentials and removed from the UK Medical Register, and The Lancet published a full retraction.

This goes way beyond politics and ethics. We’re talking lives here. In protecting against potentially devastating viral illnesses, the benefits of the MMR vaccine far outweigh any negative effects.

Measles can cause encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) and pneumonia. The World Health Organization reported that, despite a 74% global reduction in measles deaths between 2000 and 2007 as a result of vaccination, nearly 200,000 children died of the virus in 2007.

Mumps can cause meningitis (inflammation of the brain and spinal cord), deafness, and infertility in men.

Rubella, or German measles, mostly affects fetuses. A woman who contracts rubella early in her pregnancy has a 20 percent chance of delivering a child with a birth defect such as blindness, deafness or mental retardation.

As a result of Wakefield’s duplicity and greed, and the public’s gullibility, hundreds of thousands of kids have been exposed to childhood diseases – mainly whooping cough and measles – which vaccinations had all but eradicated, and the vaccine-autism myth is still being propagated, see above. (Yeah, I do have energy on this, now you mention it.)

I’ll let the Boston Globe have the last word: “Immunization rates in Britain dropped from 92 percent to 73 percent, and were as low as 50 percent in some parts of London. The effect was not nearly as dramatic in the United States, but researchers have estimated that as many as 125,000 U.S. children born in the late 1990s did not get the MMR vaccine because of the Wakefield splash.”

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Barry Evans gave the best years of his life to civil engineering, and what thanks did he get? In his dotage, he travels, kayaks, meditates and writes for the Journal and the Humboldt Historian. He sucks at 8 Ball. Buy his Field Notes anthologies at any local bookstore. Please.