Immunization Quotes

“Vaccines have saved countless lives and, suitably deployed, can save countless more. But believing this, as I do, does not commit me to a belief in the universal benefit of all vaccines that industry might see fit to produce.”
― Stuart S. Blume, Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial

“Vaccine hesitancy is fuelled by awareness that the vaccination policies to which people are expected to conform are being formulated not by their elected representatives but in hazy supranational organizations, the accountability of which is wholly unclear.”
― Stuart S. Blume, Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial

“Today health officials are under pressure to introduce new vaccines, whatever national needs or priorities might be, and irrespective of whether or not they even have the data on which to base an assessment of the burden of disease.”
― Stuart S. Blume, Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial

“The start of mumps vaccination in the Netherlands had nothing to do with saving lives. It was because policymakers were convinced that they could save on the costs of caring for sick children,”
― Stuart S. Blume, Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial

“From a commercial perspective it obviously makes sense to develop any vaccine for which a profitable market can be established. Establishing that market, in the face of public indifference, may mean reframing a disease in the minds of public health policymakers or the population at large. The objective has to be to convince the world that if a vaccine can be made, it should be used: that any threat, or potential threat, that can in principle be reduced by vaccination is worth the effort.”
― Stuart S. Blume, Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial

“Authorities were goaded into action less by reflection on historical data than by public anxieties.”
― Stuart S. Blume, Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial

“The technologies that researchers try to develop and that entrepreneurs try to bring to the market reflect perceptions both of scientific feasibility and of need or potential demand.”
― Stuart S. Blume, Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial

“So it happens that doubts can emerge long after a medical technology has entered widespread use. The claim that the pertussis vaccine could lead to brain damage (later shown to be unfounded) emerged thirty years after its introduction.”
― Stuart S. Blume, Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial

“To what extent did development of these mumps vaccines reflect the burden of the disease? Was it a matter of widely different assessments of the health risk posed by mumps? Or was there a sense that anything that could be prevented should be prevented?”
― Stuart S. Blume, Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial

“They were starting to understand that people infected with the virus excrete some of it, so that in places with poor sanitation some is very likely to find its way into the water people drink or use for cooking, washing or swimming. This was why children living in poor communities with poor sanitation could acquire a mild infection early on, and as a result become immune. Children in wealthy neighbourhoods enjoying the highest standards of hygiene would not have this immunity.”
― Stuart S. Blume, Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial

“The risks of catching an infection as estimated by epidemiologists will not necessarily correspond with parents’ sense of the risks they think their children face.”
― Stuart S. Blume, Immunization: How Vaccines Became Controversial