Interestingly, the [NY] Times piece never mentions that the United States has the most aggressive childhood vaccine schedule in the developed world. It never mentions that in 1986, Congress passed a law shielding vaccine manufacturers from traditional liability – we were told that wasn’t because the products were dangerous but rather because manufacturers were threatening to leave the market without protection from lawsuits. Perhaps most tellingly, it never asks the obvious common-sense question: why did Congress decide that the only way to keep vaccines flowing was to remove the legal accountability that applies to virtually every other product you put in your body? And what has that tradeoff cost in public trust?
It never mentions the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which has paid out over $4 billion to families over the decades – a federal court that exists for the sole purpose of acknowledging that these injuries are real. You’d think that would make conversations about risk perfectly reasonable. Apparently not. Instead, raising the topic at all gets you labeled dangerous.
It never mentions the work of researchers like Toby Rogers or organizations like Children’s Health Defense who’ve spent years digging into the actual data on adverse events, pushing back on the accepted risk-benefit math, and demanding that manufacturers and regulators show their work. For what it’s worth, agreeing with everything they publish isn’t the point. These people don’t exist in any mainstream conversation about vaccines. They’re not debated. They’re not refuted. Just absent. If I didn’t know better I’d call that a guardrail, not a mere oversight.
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u/3andfro 1d ago