Dr. Sherri Fivenickle, one of America’s most prominent anti-vaccine doctors, is well known for boasting that she has spent over 18,000 hours researching vaccines. It came as to a great surprise to may of her followers when she announced last week that an additional 4 hours of research had completely changed her mind on the subject.
“I decided to do a few more hours of research, and was stunned to learn after 4 hours, that I had been basically wrong about everything,” she told The Spudd. Dr. Fivenickle cited several recent papers which changed her mind. The paper “Contagious diseases in the United States from 1888 to the present,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2013 found that vaccines had prevented over 100 million cases of infectious diseases and saved millions of lives in the US. “My God,” she said after reading the paper. “Can any medical intervention even come close to matching the success of vaccines in preventing disease? No!”
The next paper she cited was entitled “Safety of Vaccines Used for Routine Immunization of US Children: A Systematic Review” and was published in Pediatrics in 2014. This paper found that serious side effects of childhood vaccines are “extremely rare.”
“Even band-aids have risks,” she said. “The paper showed that while vaccines are not risk free, serious adverse events are really one in a million.”
“I always tell people they should have an open mind,” she said. “These two papers are beautifully done research, which exhaustively document the enormous benefits of vaccines and their unmatched safety. These were published in top-tier medical journals and are extremely persuasive to anyone who has a few hours to spare.”
Additionally, she reported spending 30 minutes reading the article “Economic Evaluation of the Routine Childhood Immunization Program in the United States, 2009” which was also published in Pediatrics. This article concluded that vaccines, “among members of the 2009 US birth cohort will prevent ∼42 000 early deaths and 20 million cases of disease, with net savings of $13.5 billion in direct costs and $68.8 billion in total societal costs.”
“I realized that people who oppose vaccines, like I used to do, were really lining the pockets of Big Pharma by allowing these diseases to come back. No wonder people called me a pharma shill behind my back,” she told The Spudd. “It is amazing what an extra 4 hours of research were able to accomplish.”
Dr. Fivenickel denied reports that she would be closing down her online supplement store anytime soon.
