n's ongoing initiative to immunize every American child against infectious disease seems like the kind of safe-as-milk, baby-step health policy that everyone should love. The ultimate motherhood issue. But Clinton, presumably, didn't consult Len Horowitz. A former dentist-turned-"healthcare motivational speaker," Horowitz is carving out a new niche in the history of the paranoid style in American politics. His message: The aids and Ebola epidemics resulted from the contamination·possibly intentional·of common vaccines by the military-medico-industrial complex. The Rockefeller Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control, famed AIDS researcher Dr. Robert Gallo, and·yes·Henry Kissinger all figure in Horowitz's gallery of germ-warfare conspirators. Horowitz, who apparently honed his expertise on such matters by drilling teeth in Gloucester, Massachusetts, has urged the government to stop immunizing children until independent researchers can determine if the shots are spreading disease. He charges up to $3,500 to share his theories with holistic-medicine groups, survivalist conventions, and other pockets of suspiciousness. During the past couple of years, he has rarely lacked for speaking engagements.
Allen observed that: "In a sense, mass childhood immunization has become a victim of its own success. Infant mortality rates in the U.S. are a quarter of what they were in 1950. The average child's of risk contracting polio, measles, or diphtheria is vanishingly low. No one questioned whether Normandy had been worth it after Hitler was crushed. But, the more the killer germs of the century a fade from memory, the more the public's attention focuses on the adverse reactions vaccines themselves inevitably, if only occasionally, cause."
Public perceptions among opponents of immunizations have shifted over time. Allen observed that:
For the early anti-vaccinationists, immunization was a crime against hygiene and a get-ric...