The Magazine Brendan Hoffman / Getty Images How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All by Paul A. Offit Basic Books, 288 pp., $27.50 How the Internet Is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit by Robert Goldberg Kaplan, 336 pp., $25.99 Over the last few months, we have seen the final and decisive disavowal of the work of Andrew Wakefield. Sadly, the damage this man has done is almost incalculable. More than a decade ago, Wakefield set off a frenzy of fear when he presented “data” in the British medical journal Lancet that cast doubt on the safety of vaccines. Lancet eventually retracted the article, and only recently it was revealed that Wakefield may have had financial incentives to publish his spurious findings. Unfortunately, uninformed citizens, sensationalistic journalists, and opportunistic celebrities continue the momentum of his discredited work—endangering individual lives and our public health. As vaccine advocate and expert Paul Offit has said, “You can’t unring the bell.” Nevertheless, that is exactly what Offit tries to do in Deadly Choices. Because of the deleterious impact of Wakefield and others like him, this book is a much-needed inoculation to help prevent future public scares. Offit reviews the history of vaccines, their importance, and the various attempts to discredit them over the past few centuries. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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