The photograph seemed out of place in a science textbook. But there it was, looking for all the world like something out of a war zone. I’m not sure I fully understood what I was looking at at the time, but I’ve remembered it. Now, years later, I’ve found it again, and I think I understand it a bit better.
This was the picture (public domain from the FDA, via Wikimedia Commons):
That was the iron lung ward at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital, circa 1953. That was polio.
Andrew Wakefield, the vile fraud who started the MMR vaccine scare and is thus responsible for unnecessary illness and death in hundreds of children, may have been stricken from Britain’s medical register this week, but the fight against the anti-vaccine conspiracy movement is far from over. We’ve come so far in so little time. Lest we ever forget, this is what’s at stake.