From RationalWiki
Fears about vaccines were excusable when they were new, but present concerns are groundless.
The anti-vaccination movement is a loosely organized subculture which blames modern vaccination for a wide range of health problems. The movement, often led by people with no medical or scientific qualifications (or even stripped credentials), is based largely on alleged short and long term side effects, which are often trivial when compared to the severity of what were once common illnesses.
In recent times, there has been much debate in the press and in the doctor's office regarding what possible side-effects vaccines cause and whether these outweigh the risks of leaving a population without a vaccination schedule. Vaccines have been alleged to cause all
is a prominent example, as its direct causes are still fairly mysterious and probably very wide-ranging, with no single cause or lifestyle risk-factor being identified. Some prominent Americans have spoken out vociferously about the supposed danger of vaccines.
The mechanisms for claimed health problems are rejected or have not been explained by current
research. Vaccine-preventable diseases have been a major cause of illness, , and
throughout human history. The advent of the modern vaccine era has change most
have little memory of a pre-vaccine era where diseases such as mumps and
— to say nothing of smallpox or polio — were common and often deadly.
In the United States, many state laws support an individual (or parental) right to choose whether to be vaccinated against any disease. Forty-eight states allow religious exemptions for compulsory vaccination as of 2014, and twenty states allow exemptions on philosophical or personal objections to vaccination.
John D. Grabenstein, wrote an extensive analysis on parents' religious exemptions for vaccines versus what a wide-range of religions actually say. His analysis found that there were "few canonical bases for declining immunization, with
a notable exception." Parents claims for religious exemption were usually based on fears rather than specific religious tenets.
A Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE) chancellor of , Wang Dan (957–1017 CE), lost his eldest son to smallpox and sought a means to spare the rest of his family from the disease, so he summoned physicians, wise men, and
from all across the empire to convene at the capital in Kaifeng and share ideas on how to cure patients of it until a man from Mt. Emei spread knowledge about inoculation. The first clear and credible reference to smallpox inoculation in China comes from Wan Quan's ( CE) Douzhen xinfa (痘疹心法, Philosophy on Poxes) of 1549 CE, which states that some women unexpectedly menstruate during the procedure, yet his text did not give details on techniques of inoculation.
Inoculation was reportedly not widely practiced in China until the reign of the Longqing Emperor (reign
CE). From these accounts, it is known that the Chinese banned the practice of using smallpox material from patients who actually had the full-blown disease of Variola major (considered too dangerous); instead they used proxy material of a cotton plug inserted into the nose of a person who had already been inoculated and had only a few scabs.
Anti-vaccination
is usually presented in lots of scary, little "facts." Notice also the gigantic, oversized depiction of the needle.
There are many ideas which are not supported by reviewed and accepted scientific
that vaccines are inherently harmful. For example, it is claimed that specific vaccines such as
(mumps, measles and rubella), or specific ingredients like
are causative factors leading to disease. Some claims are more vague, based on the feeling that vaccines are "," that they are somehow "useless," or that the diseases they prevent "." Anti-vaccination campaigners often use the language of being for "freedom" in whether to be vaccinated, such as with MMR, where the campaign was the "choice" to take a non-combined vaccine. These beliefs often stem f for instance, vaccination programs are seen as , or as an implementation of , although it's hardly just a
thing, as a look around
will tell you, and
is another reason some oppose vaccines. Similarly, those against "artificial" interference will also shun vaccination regardless of efficacy. It could be argued that these ideologies are the root causes of anti-vaccination positions, and
which specific concern an individual will be attracted to.
There is, of course, well developed published data on the complication rates of vaccines and this data plays an essential role of the approval process vaccines must pass in order to be licensed for sale, and recommended for use. When faced with this, anti-vaccination activists often argue that the reporting system is , resulting in these figures being misleading. The
is that unexpected side-effects can occur, just as a parachute may fail to open, but the regulatory process ensures that such events are
and within a risk boundary that means vaccination is statistically safer than non-vaccination.
For vaccination recommendations by
or advisory institutions (ie. the ) to change to an anti-vaccination stance, it must be fully demonstrated that the harms caused directly by the vaccine are greater than the harms caused by withholding the vaccine from circulation.
This needs to be demonstrated at a population level, with solid and significant .
Adverse reactions to the
Ceravix, reported between April 2008 and 23 September 2009. Very few, and fairly mild.
To put it simply: complications are more likely to arise from illness than from vaccination.
Most commonly used vaccines have a risk of
however, the risk is ridiculously low. With respect to milder complications, it's often difficult to tell if the vaccine actually was the cause as the
effect can be very strong with injections.
The current impact of vaccines on health is very simply stated by the CDC.
Children who get measles have a 1 in 20 chance of developing a
however, serious complications from the vaccine number 1 or 2 per million, according to the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins University. Based on historical analysis of measles-infected vs. measles-vaccinated children, a 2015 analysis reported that it is likely that there is a long-term immuno-suppression caused by measles infection that increases the likelihood of fatality from other diseases.
Before the introduction of measles vaccination, there were about half a million cases per year in the , while only 89 cases were diagnosed in 1998.
Historically, the mortality rate for measles in the U.S. was about 1 to 3 deaths per every 1000 cases, with young children suffering the highest mortality rates.
Most deaths occur as a result of pneumonia or encephalitis.
After the introduction of polio vaccination, cases in the United States decreased from almost 30,000 in 1955 — many of which led to paralysis or death — to 910 cases by 1962.
New cases of polio in the U.S. are now a thing of the past.
Of the two types of polio vaccine, the oral vaccine, while effective, is the less safe of the two.
As there are no more naturally acquired cases in the U.S., the oral vaccine had become the only cause of polio (8-9 cases).
Since the vaccine risk, however small, eventually exceeded the disease risk, the oral vaccine was abandoned in favor of the killed vaccine.
In regions where polio is still a major problem, the oral vaccine is still a better choice, as it can enter the
supply and vaccinate others passively.
In regions with high
rates, this may be less true, as live vaccines are usually avoided in patients with compromised immune systems.
According to Willem van Panhuis et. al. 2013, "a total of 103.1 million cases of these contagious diseases have been prevented since 1924 on the basis of median weekly prevaccine incidence rates."
In , there was concern in the early 70s about the pertussis vaccine, where it was blamed for several cases of encephalitis.
Despite the connection never being proven outright, vaccination rates still dropped from 77% to 39%.
Following this drop in immunization, the UK was hit by two large whooping cough
(one in 1978, and another in 1982), both of which resulted in many deaths.
Unfortunately, these sorts of consequences from vaccine denial aren' whooping cough also hit the American northwest, generating one of the worst outbreaks in 70 years, with a 1300% increase in cases in 2012 entirely blamed on recent hysteria over vaccines.
The rates of complication from vaccines are so low that the benefit of vaccines for each individual child is higher than the risk of a poor outcome, so it is not true that the few children with adverse events are being sacrificed for the health of others. Nonetheless, in the United States there is legal recognition of the potential for adverse effects from vaccines, which are handled by the Office of Special Masters of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ("vaccine court"). This court uses a no-fault compensation program based on a vaccine injury table that is regularly reviewed by the Institute of Medicine.
Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vs. the MMR vaccine
Complication rates per infection
Complication rates per injection
Pneumonia: 60,000 per 1,000,000
Encephalitis: 1,000 per 1,000,000
Corneal lesions: Leading cause of blindness in developing countries.
Death: 2,000 per 1,000,000
Incidences:
Reported: 500,000 cases per year in the U.S. (about 0.3%), population approx 190,000,000
Estimated: 3-4,000,000 cases per year (about 2%)
MMR Vaccination:
Possibly vaccine-caused anaphylaxis[]: 0.65, 1, or 1.8 per 1,000,000 injections
Possibly given 5 times in a lifetime, including booster shots, high-risk populations, and persons without document usually only given 2 times
Congenital Rubella Syndrome: 250,000 in 1,000,000 (if woman becomes infected early in ), which comes with .
Incidences: Rubella occurred primarily in epidemics every 6 to 9 years. During , there were an estimated 12.5 million rubella cases in the United States, population approx. 191 million. Rubella then affected about 0.868% of the population each year, if 12.5 million cases occurred on average every 7.5 years.
atrophy: 140,000 per 1,000,000 males
: 250,000 per 1,000,000 in the first trimester
Meningitis: 100,000 per 1,000,000
Incidences: Before 1967, about 186,000 mumps cases (0.0936% of population) were reported many more occurred.
Diphtheria, Tetanus, and Pertussis vs. the DTaP vaccine
Complication rates per infection
Complication rates per injection
Diphtheria:
Death: 50,000 per 1,000,000
DTaP vaccine:
Continuous crying, then full recovery: 1,000 per 1,000,000
Convulsions or shock, then full recovery: 70 per 1,000,000
Acute encephalopathy: 0-10.5 per 1,000,000
Death: None proven
Death: 200,000 per 1,000,000
Pertussis:
Pneumonia: 125,000 per 1,000,000
Encephalitis: 50,000 per 1,000,000
Death: 650 per 1,000,000
See the main article on this topic:
Some anti-vaxxers argue that vaccines are bad because they contain thiomersal. Usually, it is claimed that thiomersal is bad because it contains mercury. While some mercury-compounds are toxic, the concentrations of thiomersal in vaccines is so low as to be almost negligible, thiomersal's type of mercury-compound is significantly less harmful, and thiomersal has been phased out from most vaccines in developed countries.
A growing number of
believe that
pharmaceutical companies have intentionally tainted the polio vaccines used in their countries.
They believe that Western powers secretly use the vaccines to spread AIDS and/or infertility among Muslims.
An alternative story, also applied to insulin, is that the vaccine's chain of manufacture includes live pigs or pig cells. Unfortunately, this wave of hysteria has led to a sharp decrease in polio vaccinations and an almost equally sharp increase in polio cases in Muslim countries. Four state governments in the predominantly-Muslim part of
further increased the hysteria by banning all polio vaccines in 2004. This isn't limited to
wrote an article claiming the polio vaccine was a .
An unfounded fear common to anti- and anti-vaccination
is that aborted fetuses are being used as ingredients in vaccines or that abortions are necessary to manufacture them. This is a
of the fact that the weakened form of the viruses in some vaccines are grown in a culture derived from a cell line taken from fetal tissue. There are no fetal cells in vaccines and the original fetuses were aborted way back in the 1960s.
There has been much concern about a possible link between
and vaccines, particularly the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine in the UK and thimerosal in some .
Part of this concern is due to a possible rise in cases of diagnosed autism over the last few decades — much of it raised by parents of autistic children, and by prominent Americans such as ... but rarely by autistic people themselves.
More often than not, evidence given by those peddling a link is indirect and .
When such groups do attempt to be scientific, they primarily cite links between ethylmercury exposure and other neurological problems outside the setting of vaccine administration.
For instance, according to one source, "In 1977, a
study found that adults exposed to much lower concentrations of ethylmercury than those given to American children still suffered brain damage years later."
The following statement, attributed to Dr Boyd Haley, whom
has referred to as "disgraced," gives
of a link between ethylmercury and "brain damage":
You couldn't even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe...
It's just too darn toxic.
If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its brain will sicken.
If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die.
If you put it in a petri dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would be shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing damage.
This statement works to , but makes no mention of actual vaccines or actual patients.
It certainly doesn't mention statistics or dose levels, which is important when discussing medical effects of chemicals.
into a petri-dish of cells (in vitro) is not the same as exposing an actual living
(in vivo) to the chemical — for a start the body has certain defence mechanisms against chemical attack.
This is why actual studies are undertaken, and many promising anti-biotics and medicines have failed because they work in vitro but not in vivo.
Several very well-done population-based studies have been conducted into the link between autism and vaccinations, although they aren't very widely reported.
These hard facts tend not to resonate with the public consciousness and
as much as anecdotes and sob stories from concerned individuals and interest groups do.
This has been a problem with health scares for decades, and shows no sign of going away.
The particular studies have looked at actual populations in
conditions, exposed to the actual s none have shown any connection between autism and the thimerosal preservative or the MMR vaccine.
There is overwhelming evidence that the MMR and thimerosal-containing vaccines play no role in the development of autism. This contrasts with many of the papers supposedly showing a link, which are often underpowered or badly controlled. Ironically, one epidemiological study has indicated the MMR vaccine has reduced rates of one risk factor for autism-.
A small study by , published in The Lancet in 1998, became infamous around
when the UK media caught hold of it.
It hypothesized an alleged link between the measles vaccine and autism despite a small sample size of only 12 children.
This eventually lead to what
columnist and
described as "the media's MMR ," due to the evidence for any link being so lacking that it may as well have been entirely .
The paper was partially retracted several years later but continued to be the most often cited case study for the link, despite mounting evidence (including one large study into the rates of autism in adults who wouldn't have received MMR) to the contrary.
It was finally considered "thrown out" on February 2, 2010 after it was discovered that Wakefield behaved unethically.
Specifically, Wakefield was found guilty of not acting in the best
interests of the children he did research on (one child was severely injured in a colonoscopy), as well as not disclosing his previous involvements with anti-vaccination groups prior to the study and it hitting the news.
Further examinations show that Wakefield outright
or selectively ignored facts in his study, such as preexisting conditions in 5 of the 12 children.
Autistic adults and other reasonable-minded people maintain that it is hate speech to claim that vaccines cause autism because it implies claiming ipso facto that a person is better off dead of an easily preventable disease than alive and autistic. Anti vaxxers have also been accused of hating autistic children due to comments made by anti vaxxers characterizing autistic children as brain-damaged and soulless.
Concern has been raised about a connection between MS and vaccines, especially the .
One of the several studies done on the topic showed a potential link, but there were methodological problems, and most other studies failed to show a link.
The most recent CDC publication on the matter cites fifteen different studies showing no link between MS and the Hepatitis B vaccine.
The DTaP vaccine has been suspected of causing Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which causes children to stop breathing and die.
However, studies have not shown a connection between SIDS and DTaP vaccinations.
Recent studies have identified abnormalities in the development and function of medullary serotonin (5-HT) pathways in the postmortem
from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) cases, suggesting 5-HT-mediated dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system in SIDS. This is basically stating that SIDS has a strong
component and is more prevalent in families that have issues with serotonin re-uptake, thus preventing the infant from shifting when their airway becomes blocked while asleep.
Research into SIDS is progressing, and has left behind the fictional link to vaccines.
A small group of people have tried to tie
to childhood vaccinations. The "studies" that have been published are quite weak.
Most are available only online from non-recognized sources, and are "..."
The rest of the "evidence" is based on personal testimonials of involved parents and physicians.
These ideas are well-debunked
(PDF warning).
"Vaccinosis" or "Chronic Vaccine Disease" is a term invented by the
fraternity to describe a raft of symptoms purportedly caused by vaccines. Like many made up illnesses, claims about "vaccinosis" often exploit genuine symptoms, such as known adverse reactions to vaccines, and exaggerate them to pander to fear and mistrust of medicine.
WHO defines vaccinosis thusly: "Your search for vaccinosis did not match any documents." The CDC, on the other hand, define vaccinosis as: "No pages or documents were found containing 'vaccinosis'."
Under-vaccination and delayed vaccination of children is a much more common problem than completely unvaccinated children. "Overwhelming their developing immune systems" is frequently given as an excuse for parents to delay or skip some vaccines for their children.
Because the number and frequency of childhood vaccines has increased over the years and because many parents
the horrible effects of most of these separate childhood diseases, an increasing number of parents have become vaccination-shy on behalf of their children.
A review of medical literature concluded:
Current studies do not support the hypothesis that multiple vaccines overwhelm, weaken, or "use up" the immune system. On the contrary, young infants have an enormous capacity to respond to multiple vaccines, as well as to the many other challenges present in the environment. By providing protection against a number of bacterial and viral pathogens, vaccines prevent the "weakening" of the immune system and consequent secondary bacterial infections occasionally caused by natural infection.
—P. A. Offit et al., Pediatrics
Vol. 109 No. 1 January 1, 2002
One theory, promoted widely across the internet, holds that
research showed that breastfeeding reduced the effectiveness of vaccines, and so breastfeeding should be stopped or postponed. However, the study made no such conclusions.
Vaccines are often touted as a major source of revenue for
(the pharmaceutical industry). However, vaccines have much lower profit margins than alternative drugs and only make up 2-3% percent of a trillion-dollar worldwide pharmaceutical industry. If Big Pharma was protecting their bottom line, they wouldn't focus on vaccines.
Some ideologues oppose vaccination for political or moral reasons. For example, certain
oppose the use of
on young girls for fear that it will discourage them from
by eliminating an STD, thereby depriving the right of one of its favorite pro-abstinence scare tactics. Though it won't placate Christian fundamentalists from promoting ineffective
programs, the
announced that a study has shown that Gardasil does not increase the likelihood of unsafe sex among teens.
Another example was when strange congressman
voiced his equally strange concerns about vaccination on a
broadcast: he's convinced that liberal elites are using vaccination programs to cull the earth's human population due to concerns about the scarcity of natural resources. Apparently, the evil cabal behind such a plan are aiming for a target population of 700 million, which indicates that Gohmert may have
arrived at that number by purely imaginary means.
Libertarians also oppose mandatory vaccination, believing simply that the
does not own your body, and therefore mandatory vaccines are a direct contradiction to individual .
(Note that vaccination is most effective when , meaning this is a clear case of individual choices affecting the "liberty" of others.)
among others usually make an exception for state-mandated vaccination out of practicality, much as they do national defense. Ronald Bailey at
has covered the issue with an argument part moral and part pragmatic, which looks something like this:
(1) No vaccine is 100 percent effective.
(This concession isn't actually necessary, but is helpful to understanding herd immunity)
(2) Vaccines considerably reduce the likelihood that the vaccinee will contract the disease being vaccinated for.
Corollary: Taking vaccination as a baseline (which, in the developed world, it is), the unvaccinated are more likely to contract diseases for which vaccines are in widespread use than the average person.
(3) You are more likely to catch many of these diseases from someone who has contracted the disease than from someone who has not.
Pertussis comes to mind as an example.
(4) Per (3), the more people around you have a given contagious disease, the more likely you are to contract it.
Corollary: People around you are more likely to contract said disease if you have it.
(5) Per (2), (3) and (4), the more people around you are vaccinated, the less likely you are to contract the disease for which they are vaccinated.
This is the case irrespective of whether you personally are vaccinated or not.
Corollary: If you personally are vaccinated you are less likely to contract that disease, and therefore less likely to transmit it to people around you.
Corollary of corollary: If you personally are unvaccinated you are more likely to contract the given disease, and therefore more likely to risk transmitting it to people around you.
In both directions, this is the basis of herd immunity: every individual vaccinee in a population reduces the likelihood that a case of a disease will occur at all, and every case that doesn't occur reduces the likelihood, in the rare cases where a vaccine does not work as expected for a given individual, that the individual will ever be exposed to the pathogen anyway. The success of mass smallpox vaccination illustrates the positive
at work here.
(7) As a consequence of the various parts of (6) and the corollary established in (2), by abstaining from vaccination the abstainer exposes people around him to a risk of disease greater than the baseline.
(8) Per (7), abstention from vaccination may be reasonably perceived as endangering people around you.
Can you explain why better nutrition and sanitation eliminated polio in 1954-55 but waited until 1964 for measles? It's very sneaky of nutrition and sanitation to kick in only at the same year vaccines are released.
—Andrew L.
Many anti-vaxxers claim that better sanitation is the true reason that rates of diseases were massively reduced around the time. This is very questionable. As noted by the quote above, not all diseases decreased at the same time or the same rate, suggesting that they were not prevented by the same changes. "Sanitation" is not a binary -- for example, modern toilets and plumbing, which hugely helps in preventing waterborne diseases such as cholera, took many decades to reach even a majority of citizens in any country. And polio has been nearly eradicated not by eliminating world poverty and lack of sanitation, but via vaccination -- so even if sanitation helps, it is clear that vaccines work.
Some anti-vaxxers, rather than holding some truly far-fetched idea about autism or other diseases being caused by vaccines, claim that natural infection is better for a child than vaccination, simply . Very few of these same people want to give their kids large doses of all-natural cyanide, though, for . That aside, there are several problems with this approach:
Vaccines have a much smaller likelihood of causing the symptoms of the disease, such as pneumonia (pneumococcus et al.), meningitis (Haemophilus influenzae, type b), liver cancer (hepatitis B), etc.
Some vaccines do a better job building immunity than a "normal" infection with the corresponding disease. It is known that measles infection causes short-term immuno-suppression, and there is evidence to believe that it also causes long-term immuno-suppression.
Many of the alleged means by which to infect your child are either hit-and-miss or outright scams.
is pestilence, and pestilence is from the . The devil is
and disease, which is
and any of those things that can take you down. But if you trust in the , these things cannot come near you.
—Dina Check, on why her daughter should be entitled to spread disease in
gets his H1N1 shot. Beware!
In August 2013, there was an outbreak of measles in the Eagle Mountain International Church based in Newark, . The pastor, Terri Pearsons, was critical of vaccines (due to the
autism link) and because of this the majority of the 's members refused vaccination. After a member of the congregation traveled to
they brought the measles back, where it spread quickly to the congregation, staff, and day care. Every reported case (21 total in the church) came from people who refused vaccination. There were no deaths from the outbreak, and the silver-lining came in the form of Pearsons reversing stance and advocating vaccinations, as well as the church hosting vaccination clinics.
Another outbreak in late 2014-early 2015, which started in Disneyland, was directly linked to children who weren't vaccinated, where 15 of the original 20 patients in the outbreak had not received the MMR vaccine.
In the United States it is generally held (perhaps "legally held" is a better way to phrase it) that parents have the right to have their children not be inoculated if they, the parents, so desire.
vaccine was a hot topic among vaccine denialists, from fears the vaccine was unsafe (stoked by reports of side effects from the old 1976 swine flu vaccine) to
that the vaccine was a plot to curb .
Safety concerns about the
Cervarix were raised after a girl died
with the vaccine.
The story was immediately jumped on by anti-vaccination groups and was widely reported in the general and
It was later determined that the death was due to an undiagnosed , but the same media that cried out for "more research" into the incident preferred to
undoubtedly a large part of the UK population still believe the young girl died due to a direct reaction to the vaccine.
Anti-vaccination blogs and organizations, of course, have cried foul on this conclusion.
also hyped up fears about the jab by — one can only assume deliberately — misquoting Dr Diane Harper and claiming that the vaccine was "just as deadly as the cancer." Indeed, practically every single one of the claims, which were on the front page of the newspaper, ranging from what Dr Harper actually said, to her actual level of involvement in the vaccine. In true
style, the corrections were well and truly buried.
It got into the spotlight in the
as candidate
claimed a woman told her her daughter had become
after receiving the HPV vaccine while attacking her opponent .
Three of the
announce that childhood vaccines should be voluntary: , Carly Fiorina, and . Chris Christie was accused of "pandering to the anti-vaxxer crowd". Dr. (!) Rand Paul doubled-down — and reiterated Bachmann's idiocy from the previous race — by saying that vaccines can cause "mental disabilities".
In April 2015,
legislators proposed removing the "personal belief" exemption from childhood vaccination requirements in public schools. The proposed legislation does not remove a religious exemption, so how "personal belief" can be differentiated from religion remains to be seen if the legislation passes in this form. Discredited ex-doctor
has begun rallying the antivax troops against this proposed legislation. He is reportedly contemplating busing
students to rally at the state capital. The final bill that was signed into law by Governor
removed both the personal and religious exemptions from vaccine requirements.
Having lost the legislative fight in California, antivax activists are attempting to recall state Senator Richard Pan from office. Dr. Pan, a pediatrician, was the primary author of the mandatory vaccination legislation. The activists are also attempting to get an initiative on the state ballot that would overturn the legislation.
A 2012 survey of US pediatricians and family physicians that was published in 2015 reported that one-fifth of pediatricians refused to treat children of vaccine refusers, primarily to protect other patients.
More recently, the MMR-autism link (mentioned above) hit the UK headlines after , the lead author of a paper suggesting a link between autism and MMR, was found guilty of unethical conduct.
Despite the ruling only applying to his ethical conduct in the research, which had been questioned for several years (a "conflict of interest" was raised in 2004, three years after he left the Royal Free Hospital under controversial circumstances), the UK media have taken the ruling to also mean "."
As those who may have seen Wakefield's original research would know, a series of 12 case studies never particularly had any credit to actually be discredited, and Wakefield's conclusions had been repeatedly discounted by further study long before the ethical matters were ruled upon. The Lancet — the premier medical journal that featured his research — issued a full retraction of the study in February 2010.
In August 2010, the Finnish National Institute of Health and Welfare recommended that use of the Pandemrix
vaccine should be discontinued, pending investigation into 15 cases of narcolepsy in recently vaccinated children and adolescents in the previous year. At the same time, the European Medicines Agency and the Swedish Medical Products agency launched their own investigations to the vaccine. Far from being quashed by , these studies were completed in early 2011, and concluded that there was indeed an increased
of developing narcolepsy in children and adolescents vaccinated with Pandemrix. A number of follow-up studies have found various relative risks, ranging from about 3
to as much as 7.5. Because narcolepsy is so rare to begin with, relative risks are hard to estimate, and the confidence intervals mentioned in the studies reflect this, generally giving a range of half to one and a half times the cited risk. Also because of the rarity, the actual risk amounted to some four additional cases per 100 000 people per year.
As is usual with
cases, these findings did not result in widespread
against vaccinations in medicine. Instead, the scientific method labored on to produce a model that explains these findings. A research group suggested that narcolepsy might be caused by the fact that certain surface proteins of the H1N1 virus resemble hypocretin, a neurotransmitter that transmits the "wake up" signal. In June 2014, they retracted the paper after having failed to reproduce its key findings, although they continue to believe that their original hypothesis remains valid. Later in the same year, a research paper comparing Pandemrix with another vaccine with the same adjuvants but different viral antigens concluded that the focus for finding the cause should be the viral antigens and not the vaccine adjuvants.
arrested about 500 parents for refusing to have their children vaccinated against polio, and over 1000 arrest warrants were issued. Officials turned to these drastic means because of community opposition and
threats. Sixty-four workers from polio eradication teams have been killed for doing their work since 2012. In 2014, Pakistan had the highest number of new polio cases in the world 327 of 413 total (or 306 of 359 of wild-derived cases).
In 2015, Pakstan, along with Afghanistan became the last two countries with endemic polio. In November 2015, a local polio co-ordinator was assassinated in the north-western Swabi district. On January 13, 2016, a
killed 15 people in the vicinity of a vaccination clinic in Quetta.
is planning to cut welfare payments to parents of unvaccinated children starting in 2016. In response, anti-vaxxers started setting up "black market" childcare facilities, with predictable results.
Alicia Silverstone
Jim Carrey
Mayim Bialik
Various vaccine "experts" writing for the
(At least their conspiracy theories about vaccine clinics were true)
It is an unfortunate but sad truth that uninformed parents will very often click on shiny, flashy, "attention grabbing" blog posts like this, as opposed to "boring", "unexciting" peer-reviewed research articles such as this.
A major cause of confusion among anti-vaxxers is the utter lack of understanding the difference between actual research and
that someone wrote on their blog. Having little to no understanding of science or the scientific process, a parent is all-too-often more likely to trust something that entertains them even while it scares them. While this is no doubt also propagated by the media, there is a key element of human behavior at play here as well. Much of the anti-vaccine movement's successes lie more with how they present their "arguments" rather than what they're actually saying.
For example, if a television network were to create an anti-vaccine special in which they used a deep-voiced narrator, ominous music, and anecdotal cases of autism that fail to provide a causal link to vaccines, parents' minds would likely be swayed long before they cut to a commercial break following the narrator saying, "Find out what happens next when Billy gets his shot. You won't be able to believe your eyes. All this and more when we return to Vaccines: the deadly poison."
Despite the hysteria and media coverage, the only serious medical condition ever linked to a vaccine was specific to the virus strain used in the manufacture of the vaccine. In fact, epidemiological evidence shows that vaccines prevent a huge burden of disease and death in the world.
Despite this, there is still a level of concern regarding vaccines.
Public education about vaccines and health must continue, and we must continue to provide everyone with the rigorous scientific education needed so that they may avoid making vital public-health related decisions based on misconceptions and lies.
, specifically the "Cancer jab" section
, 2011 report by the Committee to Review the Adverse Effects of Vaccines of the Institute of Medicine
, History of Vaccines, a project of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia
For yet another celebrity "expert" on the subject, see , Respectful Insolence, June 29th, 2012
(Respectful Insolence, July 10th, 2012) is a related dissection of a typically ridiculous example of
Respectful Insolence, February 1st, 2012: details Dan Burton's long track record of antivaccine and autism quackery, including his interference with the
The Panic Virus by Seth Mnookin. ( and )
For example, there are 20 recommended vaccinations before age 2.
Responses along the lines of "nobody I know has ever seen polio" are comparable to
responses by
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