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The Daily Beast, an American website claiming to provide “breaking news and sharp commentary,” recently published an article titled, “Thanks, Anti-Vaxxers. You Just Brought Back Measles in NYC,” providing not a shred of evidence to substantiate its vociferous claims.

In fact, The Daily Beast does not even reveal who wrote the article, publishing the diatribe under a pseudonym (‘Russell Saunders‘), presumably a New England pediatrician, effectively cloaking their author from accountability for his dauntless indictments.

The article opens, “Measles was considered eliminated at the turn of the millennium.

Now it’s back, thanks to the loons to refuse to vaccinate their children.”

Really? Those who choose not to vaccinate are “loons”?

First things first.  The only way that the act of refraining from vaccinating could be justifiably characterized as ‘insane behavior’ is if vaccines were proven effective 100% of the time, and additionally, if the benefits could be proven to outweigh the known risks of side effects, which include deadly reactions. On both counts, this is not the case for the vaccine in question. Most obviously, there is a reason why there are 2 measles vaccines on the CDC immunization schedule. One shot alone does not work. That fact alone should provide a clue to its fallibility.

But the biomedical literatures speaks clearly and firmly about the measles vaccine’s long history of documented failure, which we evaluated in our article from last year, “The 2013 Measles Outbreak: A Failing Vaccine, Not a Failure to Vaccinate,” and which includes 6 confirmed mass outbreak events since 1985 in highly immunization compliant populations (up to 99% vaccinated). These events have proven time and time again that the measles vaccine is not sufficient to prevent outbreaks.