unvaccinated children pose no risk to anyone, says harvard immunologist
one of the strengths–and weaknesses–of a western medical education is its predisposition to break things down and compartmentalize them. while much data is gleaned in the minutiae, very little attention is given to the interrelationship between disciplines. while a medical student may become a true specialist in their field, they too become compartmentalized, and are often ignorant of very important information that would be essential for a broader, more holistic overview. and this appears to be by design.  advertisement - learn more a case in point is the testimony of tetyana obukhanych, who earned her ph.d. in immunology at the rockefeller university in new york and did post-graduate work at harvard. in a presentation she delivered in british columbia (full video here), she was discussing scientific evidence from a publication dealing with a measles outbreak in quebec in 2011. the evidence showed that 48% of those who had contracted measles were fully vaccinated for measles, and this does not even include those who were vaccinated only once for the measles, as they get lumped in with the unvaccinated people. she took a moment to tell a story about how she became aware of this phenomenon: the interesting thing is that my field, the field of immunology, the basic field that sort of is responsible for all these theories of immunity, we don’t really deal with the real world. we do research in labs. we are sort of an ivory tower profession and we don’t even read these publications because this is too far away from our field. we only read what’s specific to our research and usually it’s immunizations and how antibodies are generated and all the details of the immune responses. and i went through my whole phd training and i believed that vaccines give you immunity and that if you got vaccines there is absolutely no way, virtually no way, that you would get a disease, and i’m pretty sure that most of my colleagues in my narrow field believed the same way, and we had conversations about that. and even someone at some point mentioned to me and said that they had a vaccine and they got measles and i sort of brushed it aside and thought that the person is confused. it was either she didn’t have the vaccine or it wasn’t measles, one of the two. but what happen is that a few years ago i had to apply for american citizenship and part of the procedure is to submit your vaccination records, right, and this was the first time that i looked at my own vaccination records carefully, and i discovered that i had two measles vaccines in my childhood. well, i didn’t know about it because i was too young to remember, but what i remember really well is that when i was 11 i had measles, and so that was a little bit harder to discount. and i told recently someone else and they said, ‘oh, you are confused about that, you didn’t have measles!’ like ‘how do you know?’ ‘did you check <whether> you really had the virus there or not?’ so it’s just, you know, the doctors diagnosis, right? but i lived in ukraine, and there, you know, there was tons of measles around and doctors knew when they saw measles. but anyway, so the reason i kind of had to look for these papers is to actually to confirm to myself whether i’m confused about my measles or is this a general phenomenon and it’s happening, and it’s documented in the literature. and indeed it is documented in the literature. but immunologists don’t know about it. let that sink in for a moment. you get your phd in immunology, and you leave school to go out into the world to work on things like, oh, immunization, and you haven’t learned that you can still get certain diseases even if you’ve been fully vaccinated against them? despite this being scientifically documented and an uncontested fact? again, ignorance by design.