You have to balance the benefits against the risks. That's how you make decisions in medicine.

The point of this article is that deaths from these various diseases had already dropped drastically prior to the introduction of vaccination.

What you don't do with this information is say that vaccines don't work. What you instead do with this information is say that because the risk of mortality from these diseases is now much lower, there is much less reason to use a vaccine to protect against it.

If there is an illness that has, for example, a 50% mortality rate, and a vaccine that runs a 5% chance of a serious, life threatening reaction, then if the disease is very prevalent and the risk of catching it is high, then it makes sense to get the vaccine even given the chance of a bad and possibly dangerous reaction to the vaccine. But if the mortality rate of the disease is 1%, then I'm not at all sure it makes sense to take a 5% risk of a life threatening reaction in order to avoid a 1% risk of mortality, because you'd kill a lot more people with the vaccine than you would if you just let the illness run its course through the society.

How many measles deaths have there been in the US in the last 10 years? Zero. How many deaths from the measles vaccine? 108 according to VAERS.

Given the remarkably low mortality rates for all the above listed illnesses, essentially zero, and given that these low rates were achieved mostly by improvements in sanitation and nutrition -- the vaccines that protect against them had darned well better be no more dangerous than water. Otherwise it makes no sense to use them.

To discuss the 2014 Amish measles outbreak you mentioned, how many deaths were there? Zero. How many people over age 55 got measles in this outbreak in the Amish community? Zero.

Why? Because those people acquired natural immunity from catching the disease prior to the introduction of vaccines, and the immunity is lifelong.

Thus there are two ways to go at protecting a community. One is to allow our immune systems to learn. The other is to try to trick them with vaccines.

Unbiased and honest inquiry into the possibility that vaccines have side effects, that tricking the immune system might have consequences, that injecting proteins directly into the bloodstream to stimulate immunity is not normal or physiologic and might have serious consequences -- these are the questions that our medical system ought to be asking itself. We should be asking if the explosion of food allergies is a result of injecting proteins into the bloodstream.

But, because Pharma makes a killing off of vaccines, and because Pharma and regulatory agencies and the elected officials who fund the regulatory agencies and receive campaign donations from Pharma (a situation called an Iron Triangle) all want to stifle discussion and let the money making continue, we cannot have these discussions that should be had. Instead, the discussions can only happen on the fringes amongst people who don't feel compelled to practice the religion of salvation through blind adherence to bureaucratic protocol.