Dr. Paul Offit also responded to the Milhoan interview, writing at
Beyond the Noise, "The incidence of polio in the United States skyrocketed in the United States in the 1950s when as many as
20,000 children were paralyzed by the virus. Why then? Why in the 1950s? In the 1920s and 1930s, when sanitation in the United States was poor, polio was a common disease, typically infecting babies in the first year of life at the same time they were receiving passively transferred antibodies from their mother through the placenta. Those passively transferred antibodies were often, but not always, protective against paralytic polio. (Hence the term “
infantile paralysis”.) When sanitation improved, children were exposed to polio when they were older, after maternal antibodies had worn off. Polio became a more common disease of the
5–9-year-old, not a rarer disease in infancy. In other words, better sanitation
increased the incidence of polio, the opposite of what Milhoan had claimed."
Milhoan: “It’s a very acceptable, even perhaps a laudable decision, to not vaccinate your child because of the risk of an adverse effect from measles. And that outweighs the risk of your child spreading it to another child or a child who’s, God forbid, compromised.”
Dr. Offit rebutted this view: "Milhoan is arguing that any parent could reasonably decide not to get a measles vaccine because they believe that the risks of the vaccine outweigh the benefits. Measles virus causes pneumonia, dehydration, and encephalitis that can result in blindness and deafness. Measles vaccine doesn’t cause any of those problems. So, why would any parent reasonably choose not to get the vaccine? Then Milhoan takes his argument one step further, saying that if a parent’s choice not to get a vaccine puts another child at risk, even a child who is immune compromised, that’s a reasonable, even laudable, decision."
