Hello friend, if I may, a few points worth considering:
1 - You don’t have to trust drug companies. With decades of childhood vaccines being routinely given, we have literally hundreds of studies of their real-world safety and effectiveness done by independent researchers. It sounds like you might be interested in things like the Cochrane Collaboration reviews, in which the authors amass all the literature on a topic, grade each study in rigour and quality, and take into account potential sources of bias such as funding sources when summarising the conclusions of the literature. They’re not just blanket pro-vaccine - take their summary of the ‘flu vaccine literature which finds the shots of limited use - but they find the evidence pretty clear when it comes to, say, measles vaccination. Oh, and there are vaccines for the common cold, it’s just really hard to target over 200 strains of virus at once so they’re not very good. The fact that researchers first targeted the easier-to-combat chicken pox has more to do with biologic plausibility than money.
2 - Vaccine ingredients - you get most of those things you listed in greater doses from eating everyday foods than you do from the entire schedule combined - you’ll get more phenol in wine and chocolate than vaccines; acetone, formalin and glycerol are all produced (and further metablolised) by your body as a part of normal cellular metabolism, and an infant gets more aluminium from breast milk than from the entire childhood schedule combined. Lastly thimerosal was removed from kids’ vaccines in 2001 due to people saying without evidence that it does all sorts of things, and yet we’ve not seen a change in the many diseases the anti-vax lobby claimed it was causing. The fact of the matter is that these and other vaccine ingredients are all at incredibly low doses which are well below any levels at which they could cause harm. It’s okay want to know what’s in vaccines, but scaring others just because the ingredients have scary names is not.
3 - You will be happy to hear there are studies of vaccinated versus completely unvaccinated populations. Take this one, which found a three times higher rate of pertussis, measles, mumps and rubella in the unvaccinated cohort, and also no increased rate of other infections in the vaccinated, countering the common anti-vax claim that vaccines somehow weaken the immune system. Or this study which found no negative effect of childhood vaccinations on height, weight or cognitive test scores.
4 - No, the Japanese immunisation schedule actually requires at least two different shots by age one, but they do have a more lax schedule. Oh, and tens of thousands of cases of measles a year, mostly in kids and babies. But if you’d like to see trends in American infant, neonatal and postneonatal mortality rates over the period most vaccines were added to the schedule (figure 7 in this CDC report) you’ll see an amazing decline that is really a testament to modern medicine’s ability to save babies’ lives.
5 - Some vaccines aren’t given any more. That says nothing about the ones that are. It does show that there is active surveillance of them once they’re on the market - which if anything should be reassuring. It’s amazing how many people say “You can’t trust [medicine] because it isn’t even regulated" and then in the next breath cite examples of the regulatory systems working.
6 - Yes, you can vaccinate your kids later, but that does mean there will be a longer period in which they will be more vulnerable to diseases that damage young bodies all the more harshly. That’s sort of the whole deal with vaccinations, and the schedule - protect kids when they’re most susceptible to the worst of those diseases.
7 - Yes, the vaccinated can and do catch the disease - at much lower rates. That’s also the whole point. Nothing is 100%. Vaccination lowers your chances of catching the disease and of suffering worse effects from it if you do. The measure that’s currently used - vaccine efficacy - is terrible for getting this point across, but the equation can be rearranged to give the relative rates of disease in the vax’d vs the unvaxed, a much more intuitively graspable format. For example, the ~95% vaccine efficacy of two doses of measles vax equates to 20 times the rate of infection in the unvaccinated than the vaccinated. Even the low-sounding 62% the CDC is quoting as their mid-season estimate for ‘flu vaccine efficacy equates to a 2.6x higher case rate in the unimmunised than the immunised.
And you say you’re much more healthy than all the vaccinated people you know. That’s fine, but the available evidence just doesn’t bear out that that is a universal trend. Instead, it shows that you’re more likely to catch preventable diseases, which your vaccinated friends have an up to 20x reduced risk of catching.
I hope this helps straighten out some of the misconceptions you’ve been exposed to. As an immunologist, it’s frustrating to see so many parents scared into not protecting their kids against potentially fatal diseases, thanks to the at best unsubstantiated and at worst completely fictitious misinformation spread by anti-vaccine activists.
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