The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

This book was non-stop interesting and informative as Seth Mnookin demonstrates that the anti-vaccine movement is not a modern thing, but rather goes all the way back to even the Smallpox vaccine, which we now know was responsible for fully eradicating the Smallbox virus from the world. He doesn't pretend that vaccines have no risks, or that the government and health agencies didn't frequently underestimate the consequences of not fully explaining those risks to everyone. This caused backlashes resulting in lower immunity rates as younger populations forgot about how bad each illness was.

This was repeated time and time again with polio, mumps, measles and whoooping cough (pertussis).

The book goes all the way through the landmark Autism omnibus trial as he demonstrates just how utterly lacking the case was for the anti-vaccine side as they had to delay for more than a year to even find a set of doctors willing to testify to the theory of vaccine-caused Autism.

The narrator of this was very good and was never a distraction from the content.

If you want a comprehensive view of the history of the science and psuedoscience of vaccines, this book will provide it. Seth Mnookin thoroughly exposes the anti-vaccination forces by describing in detail the contexts in which they rose. He also reveals the mistakes that govenrnment and science-based organizations have made which have contributed to the growth of the anti-vax movement within mainstream society. I was engrossed from start to finish. Highly recommendedf for those interested in the topic.

Yes

For someone like me, introduce more Laboratory experimentation settings into the picture. I enjoy those scenes a lot.

Yes.

Maybe.

This book delivers all the social aspects of Science, factless Science decisions and fraud. It is a book that needs to be listened by every parent in-doubt of Science and Vaccination. Seth Mnookin did his researches well to deliver such this nice piece and +1 for that. What I really lacked from the book was my lab experimentation settings and the Science in it was too narrow and too focused on one particular topic, I really understand it since it's main focus was to deliver Political and Social aspects surrounding Science and not how we do Science.

New parents experience a powerful need to protect their young children--a need that often surpasses all others. Having a new child can be a frightening time--the world seems to present so many threats to this vulnerable new human being depending on you for its welfare and survival. There are so many choices to make, often with competing views on how to make them. It is every parent's nightmare that a choice he/she makes might cause their child harm.

What this book makes clear is that vaccinating your child should NOT be one of those hard choices. The author powerfully demonstrates that widespread misinformation can all too often lead conscientious parents into very bad decisions; specifically, to avoid the potential harm to their child through childhood vaccinations (which is, in fact, minuscule) they actually expose their own child and other children to a fair greater danger--that of the very diseases these vaccines have so effectively conquered since they have been introduced.

What made me most angry reading this book was the callous attitude of those refraining from vaccinating their own children with regard to the welfare of other children. The only reason they can maintain their position is by relying on the fact that the large majority of children ARE vaccinated thereby creating a "herd Immunity." They certainly wouldn't want EVERYONE to take their advice in refraining from these critical vaccinations, because then the likelihood of their own child contracting the illness would dramatically increase. In fact, this phenomenon is already occurring in some locations and sadly the victims tend to be among the most vulnerable--new infants who are too young for the vaccine and babies with compromised immune systems.

This book will convince you that you are doing the right thing by your child AND your community by adhering to your doctor's advice in administering all recommended vaccinations!

I am empathetic for any parents who have a special needs child because I have a disability and my parents also saw out treatment, but at what point should they accept the abilities of their son and daughter and let them be. It seems like Autism is always in the mainstream and is the only disability that is known to the public. Instead of accepting the disorder, most families are trying to find a magic wand to cure the disability.

Having a disability is different than having a disease.

Unlike having an infection, there are no antibiotics for being disable. Knowing someone who is disable, you learn to accept their physical and/or mental limitations and move on with their lives. That being said, I was disappointed in this book. There is no doubt there are side effects in being vaccinated, but 95% of what was presented in "The Panic Virus" was all about Autism.

There are other disorders that the pharmaceutical companies can cause, but very few was in this book. It just seemed like that the author was being paid by advocates for Autism and wasn't neutral to the title.

It felt like a scare tactic of being vaccinated, but science has proven of being immunized has inoculated the common diseases that once plague the world.

This book is an eye oppener. For the people who don't know how important vaccination is, and how exposed you become when you don't get your shots. The only problem, I guess, is that the book focus too much at autism. The author could shorten some one hundred pages.