There is something wrong when you are not allowed to question public vaccine policy without automatically being labeled as “anti-science”, a believer in “pseudoscience”, or even a “conspiracy theorist”. The subject of vaccines is a serious one, and deserves to be taken seriously. Concerned parents are asking legitimate questions, and they deserve serious answers rather than dismissals. The public discussion about vaccines is essentially non-existent. Instead, the message we are told is that there is nothing to discuss. The mainstream media, for its part, has utterly failed to properly inform the public about the subject of vaccines, and rather than engaging in respectful debate, there is a tendency to try to bully people into silence and compliance. In this endeavor, the mainstream media has useful partners in the blogosphere.

As someone who is openly critical of vaccine policy, I expect to be attacked and have such labels mindlessly flung at me. So I wasn’t surprised to discover that one of the more notorious apologists for public vaccine policy, an anonymous blogger who goes by the moniker “Skeptical Raptor“, set his sights on me recently for an article I wrote in response to a Washington Post op-ed by Dr. Daniel Summers. Dr. Summers took the usual dogmatic approach to the subject, insisting there is nothing to debate, just get your damned shots. The purpose of my rejoinder to his op-ed was to illustrate why this insistence is wrong. There is a discussion to be had about vaccines, and it’s past time we started having it.

Raptor’s response to that article of mine provides me with the opportunity to reiterate that same point, as well as to illuminate the kinds of tactics employed by those who try to intimidate into silence anyone who dares to question public vaccine policy — rather than seriously addressing the legitimate concerns being raised.