I’ve done a lot of studying on vaccinations, like actually gone to the World Health Organization’s website to get statistics on the side effects of vaccinations (example) and compared it to the CDC’s statistics on the diseases themselves (example). And here’s what I’ve learned.
Vaccines are millions and sometimes billions of times less likely than the disease they treat to have side effects like brain inflammation, brain and spinal cord infection, deafness, blindness, loss of limbs, seizures, strokes, cancer, heart failure, paralysis, miscarriage, birth defects, sterility, and death.
There are billions (trillions?) of cases that link the diseases vaccines treat to death. (Flu, whooping cough, tetanus, Meningococcal disease, measles, diphtheria, and chickenpox are the most likely culprits for killing you. Several others can result in complications that could also kill you.) 30% of people who get tetanus die from it because it can stop you from things like eating or breathing. 10% of people who get Meningococcal disease die.
The guy who linked vaccines to autism was a fraud who still (to this day) makes money scaring people about vaccines. He was originally paid to discredit the MMR vaccine so some assholes could win a lawsuit. Every study since has found zero support for his findings, and he had his medical license revoked because of gigantic piles of evidence that he was doing it for money and had falsified his data and did basically everything he could to skew his study. He played the victim and pretended it was a huge conspiracy to suppress the truth, but really he’s just a greedy asshole who got (and still gets) paid for it.
If you catch a disease you’ve been vaccinated for, it will be less severe and less likely to hospitalize you. Every single time.
The human body naturally creates more formaldehyde per day than is present in any vaccine. Insisting your vaccine be formaldehyde-free shortens its storage shelf life and drives up price for no reason.
The “mercury” used as a preservative is a harmless mercury compound which is cleared from the body much more quickly than the mercury you find in the environment and has never been shown to have side-effects. Still, its use in vaccines is being decreased for people’s mental comfort.
Vaccines work by exposing your immune system to a harmless amount of the disease, like being a boxer who gets to study every move his opponent is going to make in the big fight. It’s a cheat sheet for your body.
Most vaccines are inactivated, which means they contain dead versions of the virus. Most live (attenuated) cultures aren’t used anymore, but talk to your doctor if you want to know about the vaccine you’re getting. (This is also why doctors advise against things like chickenpox parties. Dead versions of the virus are safer by a factor of probably infinity.)
Kids who are immunocompromised (like having cancer or an auto-immune disease) rely on other kids being vaccinated to keep them safe from diseases that can kill them (see: herd immunity).
The flu vaccine doesn’t last more than a year, which is why you’ll see a yearly vaccine setup at doctor’s offices and pharmacies. You can still get the flu after getting the vaccine because there are different strains of flu, so it’s not that the vaccine didn’t work, nor does it mean it’s pointless to get. The yearly flu vaccine is a guess at which strains will be widespread that year (I’m seeing that my pharmacy’s shot covers 4 strains), and getting it is a good idea because of herd immunity.
There is zero evidence that spreading out vaccines over time makes any difference except to leave that person exposed to harmful diseases. Even the guy who literally wrote the book on timing vaccines differently says he doesn’t recommend it but wrote it to give nervous parents an alternative option.
The greatest danger of vaccines is if you’re allergic to a component. Make sure your doctor has all your allergy information, and ask for a list of ingredients if you want to double-check.
The Anti-Vaccination Movement
It relies heavily on fear and has no provable data to back it up, instead relying on the myth that there is a “conspiracy” by big pharmaceuticals. There are a few reasons that’s bad logic:
Scientists and the medical community would have to all be in on it, and that’s impossible.
Pediatricians, who get into that field because they love kids and want to help them, would have to also be in on it.
It is much more likely that one person started all this because he wanted money.
According to the following definition of pseudoscience published in 1995 by renowned scientist Carl Sagan, may he rest in peace, the anti-vaccination movement has every sign of being pseudoscience:
“Pseudoscience differs from erroneous science. Science thrives on errors, cutting them away one by one. False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are framed so they are capable of being disproved. A succession of alternate hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observation. Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific hypothesis is disproved, but such disproofs are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise. Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced.” — Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
