Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought the book a few days ago and read it yesterday. The book is terrible. Horrible. Dreadful. Margulis fills the thing with unbacked assertions not real research. It is almost unbelieveable that she is a celebrated journalism fellow at one of America's best universities. The chapter on vaccines is probably her worst bit. Pages and pages and pages of sheer misinformation. The author pats herself on the back over and over and over again while writing paragraph after paragraph of lies about the subject. Ms. Margulis's primary tactic is to quote well known anti-vax critics without identifying them as such. Such critics often have a vested financial interest in anti-vaccine actions. People like Lyn Redwood are interviewed at length without mentioning that Redwood founded an organization dedicated to the false assertion that autism is mercury poisoining and that she wants to sue the pharm companies because Ms. Redwood is falsely convinced vaccines are the source of her son's autism. Margulis lovingly quotes Dr. Sears even though his arguments against vaccines or in favor of delayed vaccine schedule have no basis in fact. Same with Barbara Loe Fisher, a notorious anti-vax liar. Typical of her tactics are her arguments against the hep b vaccine. The vaccine is given in the US for a variety of reasons including the fact that we have a large Asian population and the disease is rampant in Asian countries unfortunately. She neglects to point that that hep b is over 50 times as infectious as HIV, can linger on surfaces for up to a week and is far more dangerous the younger you get it. She's done this multiple times in the past even though efforts have been made to correct her misunderstanding of this subject. There's certainly no evidence linking the hep b vaccine to lupus as the author believes. The same is true of other vaccines which the author outrageously implies are linked to various ailments including asthma, allergies and crohn's disease. She even trots out the widely discredited argument that vaccines are linked to autism. The author also argues that vaccines contain "chemicals" as if the very word were something to fear. She tells us that vaccines contain formaldehyde while failing to note that a) the amount contained is less than one would find in many items we commonly consume such as pears and b) your very own body makes the chemical as part of metabolic process. Idiotic arguments such as, "large scale vaccine safety studies have never been compared the immune systems of completely unvaccinated children to vaccinated children nor have we studied the possible long-term damage that may be done to the immune system by multiple vaccines," are repeated mindlessly even though such a study would be virtually impossible: [...] Other pages downplay the risks of polio (!!!), hib (an incredibly dangerous disease that used to kill about a thousand babies annually in the US until the vaccine was used) and even tetanus. She concludes the chapter with a literal argument that that vaccines do not correlate with lower infant mortality rates and the ridiculous argument that: "In America even the doctors most vocally championing the CDC's current schedule are choosing an alternative vaccine schedule for their own infants. At the same time, parents who selectively vaccinate or forego vaccines altogether are accused of being selfish, hiding in the herd, and causing disease outbreaks. The media vilification of parents obscures the real problem: evidence is increasing that our current vaccine schedule, while a boon for pharmaceutical companies with a captive market for their products is not in the best interests of our babies' health." (pg 222) Does Ms. Margulis really and truly think that peds have been paid off by pharm companies to hurt babies? How can she possibility hold such a belief? If she's being vilified it is because of her shoddy journalism, bad writing and bizarre decision to stand up in favor of dangerous and contagious diseases that really do kill children. All in an almost unreal pile of glurge by someone who really should know far better. I'll let the New York Times have the final word on this one: [...] "Margulis herself proves unfit for this role in a shockingly irresponsible chapter on vaccines. All of her favorite conceits are here: the money-hungry pharmaceutical companies; the pediatricians who schedule routine immunizations simply to collect insurance reimbursements; the health care workers who patronize and bully women who refuse vaccinations for their children; and the brave parents who "decide that they do not want to intramuscularly inject their child with something that is not part of the natural course of life."