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all little girls to make them safe later in life. Never mind any concern about them exposing under protected pregnant women now!

There is some rather selfish thinking present in the anti vaccine movement, a demand to avoid the very small risks of vaccination for one's own children and riding on the immunities of those children with more responsible or thoughtful parents. This also fails to consider that what is called "herd immunity" requires high percentages of immune people to work, and that some will fail to achieve full immunity even with vaccination, or have medically valid reasons not to vaccinate.

Opposition to vaccine is often fed by junk science and fear mongering. With the increased diagnosing of autism spectrum disease, parents have been frantic to find an explanation, and a very questionable assumption of causality was created from the coincidence of vaccine schedules and age of diagnosis. While the presence of mercury preservatives in some vaccines in the past was likely not a laudable thing, the evidence to prove it was truly related to autism symptoms in the tiny concentrations present simply is nonexistent.

Children likely got far more mercury from eating fish than they did from all their vaccines combined, and in any case, mercury based preservatives have been removed from virtually every vaccine manufactured currently. To read some of the anti vaccine websites and articles would seem to indicate a rock solid proof that vaccines make children autistic with too many people assuming that these claims are backed up by peer reviewed studies.

The most ironic argument is that vaccines are no longer important because the diseases they help to prevent aren't common any longer. Of course, this misses that the rather significant reason why the diseases are no longer widespread is because of widespread vaccination! It is about as sensible as arguing that there is no need to replace smoke alarm batteries because the incidence of fatal home fires has decreased since they became mandatory in so many locales. Unfortunately it is also likely to be playing with fire regarding public health.

What is reasonable is the demand that vaccines be as safe and effective as possible, and that vaccine schedules be as well researched and fine tuned as possible. The quest for safer vaccines should never be dropped, but simply writing off all vaccines without "perfect safety" is not a reasonable position. Drug makers need to be held to high standards of quality, purity, and

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