As a high school educator, I'm wondering why this is even an issue. I just looked in our school's biology textbook, and there is precious little mention of the topic.

So unless this is a special assignment, this "problem" looks like it might be a bit of a "who is right" power struggle perhaps?

As a school librarian that teaches kids how to tell legitmate information from poor quality information, might I suggest that you also point out to your student that the medical industry and govenmental agency information should be viewed with the same suspicion as you are projecting on the immunization information?

Remember these salient "facts" about this particular topic:

1) Most information about drugs, including immunizations, comes from drug companies in the for-profit sector. Their first duty, as they see it, is to their stockholders, not the consumer. The recent debacle over Vioxx, Celebrex, etc etc is but a tip of the iceberg of misinformation produced and disseminated by the pharmaceutical industry as "fact".

2) The governmental agencies charged with disseminating factual information to health consumers are often guilty of providing biased information of one sort or another, particularly when it comes to "alternative medicine" they have never studied with the same rigor they study drugs, treatments, and other information regarding conventional medicine.

3) Doctors aren't taught a lot of things in medical school, so often physicians aren't informed either. Case in point. I recently had knee arthroscopy. I was shocked to find out that doctors don't receive ANY training in orthopedics in medical school. So next time you take your kid to the emergency room for a dislocated shoulder from falling out of a tree, realize that the resident who treats your child may have never touched a patient or performed an orthopedic procedure IN THEIR LIFE.

Like they say, no system is perfect...