To the Editor:
I would like to applaud David Sheffield's recent opinion piece ("Inviting ignorance," Sept. 28). As a teacher of vaccine science here at Brown, I was appalled that the Brown Bookstore would provide a platform for Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill to peddle their ill-informed and discredited view that vaccines cause autism. Sadly, the price of this pseudoscience is often paid by children who needlessly suffer and die from vaccine-preventable illnesses — as an example, in California's ongoing whooping cough epidemic, eight infants too young to be vaccinated have died as a result of acquiring the disease from older children who should have been.
The overwhelming evidence-based consensus in the medical and scientific community is that vaccines have saved many millions of lives, and that they do not cause autism. There is already far too much ignorance and misinformation in our society — the Brown Bookstore should not have allowed itself to be used by those who would increase that total at the expense of children's health. I respectfully suggest to the Bookstore management that next time they should do a bit more homework — I'd be happy to provide a reading list.
Richard Bungiro PhD'99
Lecturer in Biology
Sept. 28
