I highly recommend this book.
Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth gives parents, physicians, researchers, and other readers a clear, accessible way to examine the scientific foundations behind vaccine-safety claims.
The book confronts the central dispute in vaccination: whether vaccines are as safe and effective as the medical establishment maintains or whether the critics’ concerns about serious harm are supported by the evidence. It consolidates material scattered across hundreds of medical articles, books, official government publications, manufacturers’ documents, and other sources, then presents the discussion in language that does not require a medical education.
What sets the book apart is its documentation. It supplies more than 1,200 scientific references and specific quotes so readers can inspect the source material for themselves. The accompanying references document is organized chapter by chapter, matches the numbered citations in the book, links to PubMed records and freely available full texts when possible, and includes archived copies of web sources to guard against broken links.
The book examines how vaccine safety is demonstrated before licensing, the selection of control groups in clinical trials, vaccine adverse-event reporting systems, post-marketing research, incentives and biases in published science, peer review, research the medical establishment has resisted conducting, and childhood vaccination guidelines that the authors argue lack an adequate scientific basis.
It also explores three major pillars of conventional vaccination teaching:
- Herd immunity and whether it applies to vaccines on the childhood schedule.
- The role vaccines played in the historical decline of infectious disease.
- The history of polio and paralysis, including what the authors call the “19 polio mysteries.”