Culture & Religion — March 25, 2015

Is Immunization the Reason George Washington (and Not the Queen of England) Is on the Dollar Bill?

George Washington was not only the founding father of the U.S., but also of mass immunization.

In a new three-minute video, Chris Woolf explains how, without George Washington’s then controversial decision to roll out mass immunization against smallpox among the patriot army, America may have become a very different place:

PBS‘s new documentary The Vaccine War investigates the impact of the modern day anti-vaccine movement on public health in America. Surprisingly, the documentary failed to address the backfire effect. A growing body of research suggests that educating anti-vaxxers about the dangers of not getting vaccinated can actually make them less likely to vaccinate themselves and their children, unless we are very careful about how we go about it. Earlier this week on this blog, we looked at the implications of this fascinating new area of research for the problem of falling rates of vaccination.

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