Vaccine Quotes & Sayings

I have studied the effects of our new lots of polio vaccine in 100 adult volunteers and during the next few days shall give it to my wife and 2 children as well as to our neighbors and their children. — Albert Sabin

When you inoculate children with a polio vaccine, you don't sleep well for two or three months. — Jonas Salk

This year, 1996, has been designated the 'Year of the Vaccine,' commemorating the 200th anniversary of Edward Jenner's vaccination of James Phipps with cowpox virus and subsequent challenge with smallpox virus. Insight into the nature of viruses, and how viruses interact with mammalian cells, has evolved since the turn of the century. — Peter C. Doherty

My own experience of over 60 years in biomedical research amply demonstrated that without the use of animals and of human beings, it would have been impossible to acquire the important knowledge needed to prevent much suffering and premature death not only among humans but also among [other] animals. — Albert Sabin

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. — Melinda Gates

Nothing but the natural ignorance of the public, countenanced by the inoculated erroneousness of the ordinary general medical practitioners, makes such a barbarism as vaccination possible ... Recent developments have shown that an inoculation made in the usual general practitioner's light-hearted way, without previous highly skilled examination of the state of the patient's blood, is just as likely to be a simple manslaughter as a cure or preventive. But vaccination is nothing short of attempted murder. A skilled bacteriologist would just as soon think of cutting his child's arm and rubbing the contents of the dustpan into the wound, as vaccinating it in the same. — George Bernard Shaw

We have yet to beat our drums for birth control in the way we beat them for polio vaccine. We are still unable to put babies in the class of dangerous epidemics, even though this is the exact truth. — Mary Calderone

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

After all, they (the pro-vaccine lobbyists) say to themselves, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. But the eggs being broken are small, helpless, and innocent babies, while the omelette is being enjoyed by the pediatricians and vaccine manufacturers. — Harris L Coulter

On May 14th, 1796, Jenner scratched the arm of a boy named James Phipps, introducing into his skin a droplet of cowpox pus that he had scraped from a blister on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairy worker. He called this pus "the Vaccine Virus" - the word vaccine is derived from the Latin word for cow. The boy developed a single pustule on his arm, and it healed rapidly. A few months later, Jenner scratched the boy's arm with lethal infective pus that he had taken from a smallpox patient - today, this is called a challenge trial. The boy did not come down with smallpox. Edward Jenner had discovered and named vaccination - the practice of infecting a person with a mild or harmless virus in order to strengthen his or her immunity to a similar disease-causing virus. "It now becomes too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice," Jenner wrote in 1801. — Richard Preston

If a vaccine works, then the vaccinators might conceivably set up what's known as ring vaccinations around Ebola hot spots. In this technique, medical workers simply vaccinate everybody in a ring, miles deep, around a focus of a virus. — Richard Preston

We were unable to discover either a vaccine or a treatment for the Flare. — James Dashner

The pediatrician Paul Offit mentioned to me, during an interview about his work, that he had recently seen two children hospitalized with influenza. Both had been immunized against everything on the childhood schedule except the flu, and both ended up on heart and lung machines. One lived, and the other died. "And then the next day, when someone comes into your office and says, 'I don't want to get that vaccine,' you're supposed to respect that decision?" Offit asked me. "You can respect the fear. The fear of vaccines is understandable. But you can't respect the decision - it's an unnecessary risk. — Eula Biss

The ideal thing would be to have a 100 percent effective AIDS vaccine. And to have broad usage of that vaccine. That would literally break the epidemic. — Bill Gates

You might be asking too much if you're looking for one vaccine for every conceivable influenza. If you have one or two that cover the vast majority of isolates, I wouldn't be ashamed to call that a 'universal vaccine.' — Anthony Fauci

Vaccination is a public health issue because influenza is a highly contagious disease. If you don't vaccinate your child, his or her schoolmates are much more likely to become ill. That is why some places (New York, for example) are making the vaccine mandatory for school children. — Michael Specter

Flu vaccine is far and away the most underutilized. — Paul A. Offit

My two Jamaican cousins ... were studying engineering. 'That's where the money is,' Mom advised ... I was to be an engineering major, despite my allergy to science and math ... Those who preceded me at CCNY include the polio vaccine discoverer, Dr. Jonas Salk ... and eight Nobel Prize winners ... In class, I stumbled through math, fumbled through physics, and did reasonably well in, and even enjoyed, geology. All I ever looked forward to was ROTC.
Autobiographical comments on his original reason for going to the City College of New York, where he shortly turned to his military career. — Colin Powell

Smallpox is natural; vaccine ain't. — Ogden Nash

The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases. From the love of splendour, from the indulgences of luxury, and from his fondness for amusement he has familiarised himself with a great number of animals, which may not originally have been intended for his associates.
The wolf, disarmed of ferocity, is now pillowed in the lady's lap. The cat, the little tiger of our island, whose natural home is the forest, is equally domesticated and caressed. The cow, the hog, the sheep, and the horse, are all, for a variety of purposes, brought under his care and dominion. — Edward Jenner

I've tried to imagine how she'd feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I'm pretty sure that she - like most of us - would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body. — Rebecca Skloot

Rotavirus does not cause all diarrhea, but it causes a lot of it. Instead of a single vaccine dose, however, harried nurses may have to give several, as diarrhoea makes it difficult for a child to retain anything. — Rose George

The use of vaccine in the control of yellow fever should occupy more or less the same place that typhoid fever vaccine has in the control of typhoid fever. No sanitary authority would desire to substitute typhoid vaccine for the supply of pure water and food, so we must not accept the yellow fever vaccine as a substitute for the elimination of Aedes aegypti. The vaccine provides individual protection for the person who cannot be protected by more general measures. — Fred Lowe Soper

Her conclusion: "You just have to follow your own heart" when it comes to medical decision-making. — Emily Matchar

That is why we have the polio vaccine. People are blazing their own trial. That is what seems to be important. I don't care to follow and to do what the mass is doing. That is not doing anything, to be doing what everyone else is doing. Everybody is unique. The funny thing about people now is that people don't really understand or really appreciate how unique each individual on earth is. — Henry Threadgill

The United States is primarily a guilt-based culture. The dominant method of social control in this country involves teaching people to feel guilt about not living up to personal expectations. Contrast this with shame-based cultures like Japan. As researchers Ying Wong and Jeanne Tsai explain in their paper, Cultural Models of Shame and Guilt, shame is "associated with the fear of exposing one's defective self to others. Guilt, on the other hand, is associated with the fear of not living up to one's own standards." In this formulation, guilt is based on failing to achieve personal ideals; shame is based on social exposure ["The Anti-Vaccine Movement Should Be Ridiculed, Because Shame Works," Gizmodo, February 6, 2015]. — Matt Novak

If you have a vaccine or an antidote that people can benefit from, you're not going to want to keep it to yourself. You're going to want to spread that wisdom or whatever to as many people as you can, so everybody can benefit from it. — Will.i.am

I am a huge believer in the flu vaccine. I have had it every year and have never had the flu. — Sarah Chalke

The risk of getting Hep B from a blood transfusion is a tiny number, but it's a bigger number than the risk of side effects from the vaccine. — Eula Biss

Unfortunately, being physically equipped to hear has little to do with the actual predilection to listen. Sharing a common tongue does not ensure earnest or successful communication. Missed connections occur among hearing people all the time, splitting open countless minor chasms and yawning gulches, fissures that no vaccine or technilogical advance will ever be able to mend or prevent. That task will always fail to us. — Leah Hager Cohen

Although it is still important to develop an HIV vaccine, we have significant tools already at our disposal that can make a major impact on the trajectory of this epidemic. — Anthony Fauci

Vaccination is a barbarous practice and one of the most fatal of all the delusions current in our time.
Conscientious objectors to vaccination should stand alone, if need be, against the whole world, in defense of their conviction. — Mahatma Gandhi

After a lot of debate and a lot of work, what people decided is, it makes a great deal of sense to be open in the system and allow people to begin to build better flu vaccines. I mean, we're still making them in eggs that come out of chickens. And we can see the consequences of that with the current H1N1 lack of vaccines. — Juan Enriquez

Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes. Before Jonas Salk developed a vaccine for polio that finally worked, he tried two hundred unsuccessful ones. Somebody asked him, "How did it feel to fail two hundred times?" "I never failed two hundred times in my life," Salk replied. "I was taught not to use the word 'failure.' I just discovered two hundred ways how not to vaccinate for polio. — John Ortberg Jr.

Humans have always used our intelligence and creativity to improve our existence. After all, we invented the wheel, discovered how to make fire, invented the printing press and found a vaccine for polio. — Naveen Jain

At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary, more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox. — George Bernard Shaw

Education is the vaccine for violence — Edward James Olmos

[I]t seems to me that a lot of the stranger ideas people have about medicine derive from an emotional struggle with the very notion of a pharmaceutical industry. Whatever our political leanings, we all feel nervous about profit taking any role in the caring professions, but that feeling has nowhere to go. Big pharma is evil; I would agree with that premise. But because people don't understand exactly how big pharma is evil, their anger gets diverted away from valid criticisms - its role in distorting data, for example, or withholding lifesaving AIDS drugs from the developing world - and channeled into infantile fantasies. "Big pharma is evil," goes the line of reasoning; "therefore homeopathy works and the MMR vaccine causes autism." This is probably not helpful. — Ben Goldacre

When I worked on the polio vaccine, I had a theory. I guided each [experiment] by imagining myself in the phenomenon in which I was interested. The intuitive realm ... the realm of the imagination guides my thinking. — Jonas Salk

Imagine a society's discovering a vaccine against a deadly disease that has been ravaging its people and continues to ravage people in neighboring societies, where the cause of the disease is incorrectly attributed to improper diet. What would be the judgment on such a society if it withheld its vaccine on the grounds that it would be ethnocentric to try to instruct members of another culture that their medical ideas are incorrect, and to induce them to adopt the effective treatment? If one accepts that one has the good fortune to be in possession of the true religion and thereby has access to the most valuable possible rewards, is one not similarly obligated to spread this blessing to those less fortunate? — Rodney Stark

Scientific literacy is an intellectual vaccine against the claims of charlatans who would exploit ignorance — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Only after realising that routine immunisations were dangerous did I achieve a substantial drop in infant death rates. — Archie Kalokerinos

Iraq has the most extensive petrochemical industry in the Middle East and a wealth of vaccine factories, single-cell protein research labs, medical and veterinary manufacturing centers and water treatment plants. — Barton Gellman

I am & have been for years a confirmed anti-vaccinationist. Anti-vaccination has no backing from the orthodox medical opinion. A medical man who expresses himself against vaccination loses caste. Tremendous pecuniary interests too have grown around vaccination. — Mahatma Gandhi

Who owns the patent on this vaccine?'
'Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun? — Jonas Salk

Gratitude is a vaccine, an antitoxin, and an antiseptic. — John Henry Jowett

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. — Alex Pareene

Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between. — Sarah Vowell

If someone you know gets sick from taking a flu shot, you will be less likely to get one even if it is statistically safe. In fact, if you see a story on the news about someone dying from the flu shot, that one isolated case could me enough to keep you away from the vaccine forever. On the other hand, if you hear a news story about how eating sausage leads to anal cancer, you will be skeptical, because it has never happened to anyone you know, and sausage, after all, is delicious. The tendency to react more rapidly and to a greater degree when considering information you are familiar with is called the availability heuristic. — David McRaney

What really reinvigorated vaccines was Prevnar, the pneumococcal vaccine that prevents against meningitis and ear infections. Here was the first vaccine to cross the billion-dollar mark. — Paul A. Offit

So, obviously, autism - which is the key in this - is a very big problem. We need more studies about it. We certainly have to try to figure out what causes it and why and do something about it. But to tab it to vaccines, I think, is a real mistake. Not only is there no evidence, but what it leads to is larger numbers of unvaccinated children. And that's not only a problem for polio. It's a problem for a wide range of vaccine-preventable diseases. — David Oshinsky

Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed:
It is safe, and you can't get safer than safe. — Jonas Salk

Christians believe, as is reported in the New Testament scriptures, that Jesus of Nazareth healed 10 men with leprosy. It sounds like an astounding feat, but compare that to Jacinto Convit who saved thousands of lives when he developed the vaccine that protects us from it. In 1988, Convit was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his anti-leprosy vaccine. So, while the promise of Jesus' healing power is a centerpiece of the Christian myth, the demigod's results leave something to be desired when compared to the rigor of man's scientific inquiry. — David G. McAfee

Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I was pretty dorky, but there are tiers of dorkdom and I always had friends, though they were equally dorky. I was one of those kids who contracted cooties in the second grade and then had cooties, because there wasn't a vaccine for it. When I was around people, though, I generally wanted to make them laugh. I told a lot of stories. — Sloane Crosley

The shadow's potential to destroy is undeniable. Lightning might strike a house and set it ablaze. But harness the electricity and the same house can be illuminated with the turn of a switch. Consider a vaccine. Included in the serum is a small amount of the disease. Light needs the dark. It is the order of the universe. What would thaw in the spring if we didn't have a winter to endure? Consciousness is conditioned against its absence, Jung wrote. Amputate the serpent's tail and the power to heal lies within. Anna — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Immunization is total nonsense! More than that is what's hidden from people about vaccines. They are dangerous. One child out of five has overwhelming disabilities from vaccines -- neurological problems, seizures. — Guylaine Lanctot

The Europeans have lots of data on the use of adjuvanted flu vaccine in the elderly, but I don't think anybody has really good data on adjuvants in children. — Anthony Fauci

The best vaccine against anger is to watch others in its throes. — Marcel Proust

People are reticent to give a newborn the hepatitis B vaccine and often delay it. — Paul A. Offit

When vaccination programs are successful to the point where the disease is unfamiliar to physicians and public alike, then concerns can arise with real or perceived side effects of a vaccine that affect a very small minority of those vaccinated. Such concerns lead to fewer children being vaccinated and to increasing occurrence of the disease. — Peter Parham

How we understand our own selves and how we work with our DNA software has implications that will affect everything from vaccine development to new approaches to antibiotics, new sources of food, new sources of chemicals, even potentially new sources of energy. — Craig Venter

There should be a vaccine against Adam Black. And all women should be given it at birth. — Karen Marie Moning

The idea of the live-virus vaccine is to produce in a continuous way some viral antigens. — Luc Montagnier

I am no longer 'trying to dig up evidence to prove' vaccines cause autism. There is already abundant evidence. This debate is not scientific but is political — David Ayoub

I'm old enough to remember when the polio vaccine was still new. Also, it hadn't been that long since most people who caught pneumonia died from it. These medical breakthroughs were practically miracles. — Pat Cadigan

They claim that autism naturally occurs at about 18 months, when the MMR is routinely given, so the association is merely coincidental and not causal. But the onset of autism at 18 months is a recent development. Autism starting at 18 months rose very sharply in the mid-1980s, when the MMR vaccine came into wide use. A coincidence? Hardly! — Bernard Rimland

On opening the incubator I experienced one of those rare moments of intense emotion which reward the research worker for all his pains: at first glance I saw that the broth culture, which the night before had been very turbid was perfectly clear: all the bacteria had vanished ... as for my agar spread it was devoid of all growth and what caused my emotion was that in a flash I understood: what causes my spots was in fact an invisible microbe, a filterable virus, but a virus parasitic on bacteria. Another thought came to me also, If this is true, the same thing will have probably occurred in the sick man. In his intestine, as in my test-tube, the dysentery bacilli will have dissolved away under the action of their parasite. He should now be cured. — Felix D'Herelle

If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity. This is the principle of herd immunity, and it is through herd immunity that mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination. — Eula Biss

When the link between the use of unsafe, mercury-laden vaccine and autism, ADHD, asthma, allergies and diabetes becomes undeniable, mainstream medicine will be sporting a huge, self-inflicted and well-deserved black eye. Then will come the billion-dollar awards, by enraged juries, to the children and their families. I can't wait. — Bernard Rimland

As a global community, we must ensure that legitimate concerns about liability do not hold back the possibility of developing an Ebola vaccine, an essential strategy in our global response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. — Sylvia Mathews Burwell

We are grateful to the Liberian people who volunteered for this important clinical trial and encouraged by the study results seen with the two investigational Ebola vaccine candidates, — Anthony S. Fauci

As noted, there's nothing wrong with the DTP vaccine per se. However, studies that have been going on for more than two decades show that, when it is administered after other vaccines, such as BCG or measles vaccine, the combination can be deadly. But only if you're a girl. — Michael Brooks

The idea that vaccines are a primary cause of autism is not as crackpot as some might wish. Autism's 60-fold rise in 30 years matches a tripling of the U.S. vaccine schedule. — Jenny McCarthy

At no time in history have we succeeded in making, in a timely fashion, a specific vaccine for more than 260 million people. — Laurie Garrett

The human papillomavirus (HPV) has long been known as a sexually transmitted infection that, at its worst, can cause cervical cancer in women. A vaccine is now available - these days, vaccines are increasingly swiftly developed - not to cure this malady but to immunize women against it. But there are forces in the administration who oppose the adoption of this measure on the grounds that it fails to discourage premarital sex. To accept the spread of cervical cancer in the name of god is no different, morally or intellectually, from sacrificing these women on a stone altar and thanking the deity for giving us the sexual impulse and then condemning it. We — Christopher Hitchens

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. — Eula Biss

Most anti-vaccine books claim that all shots are bad, the diseases aren't really anything to fear, and as long as you live a natural and healthy lifestyle, you don't have to worry. I think this is a very irresponsible approach to the vaccine issue. Vaccines are beneficial in ridding our population of both serious and nonserious diseases. — Robert W. Sears

Government reporters may cover City Hall. Education reporters may write about schools and school boards. Science writers may report on asteroids one day, HIV vaccine experiments the next, sonar technology the next, a universe without boundaries. — Deborah Blum

We can develop a social vaccine (Self-esteem). We can outgrow our past failures - our lives of crime and violence, alcohol and drug abuse, premature pregnancy, child abuse, chronic dependency on welfare, and education failure. — John Vasconcellos

There is an urgent need for a protective Ebola vaccine, and it is important to establish that a vaccine is safe and spurs the immune system to react in a way necessary to protect against infection. — Anthony Fauci

Don't grieve at the stab.
It's only meant to free you.
From the chains that bind you to the earth
and shackle you to the shadows of people.
The mirage of water cannot quench.
But is so beautiful to the thirsty.
I'm afraid. Of never knowing another life.
Different. So different.
If I let go, will You take me higher?
Above grief, want, loss.
Above all that I've ever known.
Take me higher. Unbind me from the earth.
Like a vaccine, it sickens, to make you stronger.
The stab is temporary. The freedom, eternal. — Yasmin Mogahed

The main problem, certainly, for the people who will not get vaccinated with Thimerosal, which was put into polio vaccine. And the belief was that it may cause autism. And there's been an awful lot done in terms of studies in Western Europe, Canada, the United States, and no correlation was found between Thimerosal and autism from those children who took vaccines. Indeed, when Thimerosal was taken out of many of these vaccines, the autism rate in the United States still rose. — David Oshinsky

It's clear that prevention will never be sufficient. That's why we need a vaccine that will be safe. — Luc Montagnier

The risks are far greater to your child of not getting immunized than any kind of speculative potential relationship between the vaccine and the development of autism. — Irwin Redlener

in April 2011, the US Health Department's National Vaccine Injury Compensation Programme released its figures for 2010 the report showed that allegedly safe childhood vaccines officially killed or injured no less than 2,699 children in the year 2010 in America. — Vernon Coleman

The striking thing is that WHO doesn't really have the authority to do any of this. It can't tell governments what to do. It hires no vaccinators, distributes no vaccine. It is a small Geneva bureaucracy run by several hundred international delegates whose annual votes tell the organization what to do but not how to do it. ... The only substantial resource that WHO has cultivated is information and expertise. — Atul Gawande

I admire leaders in science, people who really figure things out like Richard Fineman or people who work on vaccines, tons of people working on [the] HIV vaccine. There's leaders in business, people like Warren Buffett, who've got a certain approach they take that are pretty amazing. There [are] product innovators like Steve Jobs was, where he gets behind a concept and does a fantastic job. — Bill Gates

No one knows any longer whether the reintroduction of the bear in Pyrenees, kolkhozes, aerosols, the Green Revolution, the anti-smallpox vaccine, Star Wars, the Muslim religion, partridge hunting, the French Revolution, service industries, labour unions, cold fusion, Bolshevism, relativity, Slovak nationalism, commercial sailboats, and so on, are outmoded, up to date, futuristic, atemporal, nonexistent, or permanent. — Bruno Latour

I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed. — William Thompson

Why target two and a half million innocent newborns and children?" Barbara Loe Fisher asks of the hep B vaccine. The implication behind the word innocent is that only those who are not innocent need protection from disease. All of us who grew up during the AIDS epidemic were exposed to the idea that AIDS was a punishment for homosexuality, promiscuity, and addiction. But if disease is a punishment for anything, it is only a punishment for being alive. When I was a child, I asked my father what causes cancer and he paused for a long moment before saying, "Life. Life causes cancer." I took this as an artful dodge until I read Siddhartha Mukherjee's history of cancer, in which he argues not only that life causes cancer but that cancer is us. "Down to their innate molecular core," Mukherjee writes, "cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves." And this, he notes, "is not a metaphor. — Eula Biss

Since the 1920s, virtually all continuing medical and public health education is funded by pharmaceutical companies. In fact, today, the FDA can't even tell health scientists the truth about vaccine contaminants and their likely effects. The agency is bound and gagged by proprietary laws and non-disclosure agreements forced upon them by the pharmaceutical industry. Let us not forget that the pharmaceutical industry, as a special interest group, is the number one contributor to politicians on Capital Hill. — Leonard Horowitz

Deep love for humanity is a vaccine for depression. — Debasish Mridha

Our virus is a lot smarter than the ones you see in zombie movies. It doesn't make its victims stagger around slobbering and moaning so anyone in their right minds would run the other way. It gets you cozying up to people so you cough and sneeze it right into their faces.
We just need the vaccine. Then we'll be okay. — Megan Crewe

There are always potential side effects for every vaccine. — Michael Specter

The drops (polio vaccine) were designed,said these believers. Their intention and effect was genocidal. Nobody was to swallow them, or administer them to infants. Within months, polio was back ... — Christopher Hitchens

Education is a vaccine for violence. — Edward James Olmos

The extra time and trouble required to follow Dr. Bob's alternative schedule are hard to justify unless the dangers of contracting infectious diseases early in life are minimized and the dangers of vaccinating early in life are exaggerated. Much of The Vaccine Book is devoted to this minimization and exaggeration. Tetanus is not a disease that affects infants, according to Dr. Bob, Hib disease is rare, and measles is not that bad. He does not mention that tetanus kills hundreds of thousands of babies in the developing world every year, that most children will encounter the bacteria that causes Hib disease within the first two years of their lives, and that measles has killed more children than any other disease in history. — Eula Biss

Massachusetts is seeing a surge in the number of unvaccinated children. Last year nearly 1,200 kids entered kindergarten with religious or philosophical vaccine exemptions, roughly double the total about a decade ago. — Deborah Blum

If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate ... Choose science. — Carl Sagan