The science on vaccinations.

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I would like to see non-anecdotal evidence of the correlation between vaccines and asthma, allergies or any other negative reaction.

I never had a vaccine and I have Aspergers. It's up to you. The Salk Polio vaccine is safe, it's killed vaccine. The dangerous one was the OPV and that's because older caretakers who didn't wash their hands well after diaper changes sometimes got polio from the live polio excreted in the diaper.

There is none. All the data, and it is very extensive, says there is no correlation at all.

you can read all the data here if you like, it's all online: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... .pub3/full

While the risk is small, I wouldn't say that there is no correlation at all between vaccines and bad outcomes.

From the link:

The facts are that for a great many vaccines, maybe even all of them, there is a very small but non-zero risk.

Oh yes, sorry, there are a few other possible bad outcomes, though they are rare. Asthma, allergies and Autism though show no correlation.

I think you are quite right about that. I was considering all possible side affects (other than sore arm for a couple of days), not just those three.

My wife had a serious reaction to a vaccination as a child -- Her immune system attacked peripheral nervous system in response to a vaccine. She had to get steroid injections for years, and experienced stunted growth as a result. She has tremor and loss of sensation to this day. You'd think this would make her anti-vaccines -- however, she also has a formal medical/nutritional science education. She's not against vaccines, she recommends them -- something in her interest as it increases herd immunity. (She cannot get vaccinated).

I appreciate the people posting Dr. Ben Goldacre's material -- and the point is valid that there are certainly plenty of bad, nefarious things drug/medical companies do. It's just that you have to know how science works to even begin to understand where these areas are. Vaccines are not one of those areas. It's just a hot-point because it's so personal -- it's injected directly into the bloodstream. No wonder people are so easily skeptical of it.

I would be dead were it not for accuracy of medical science these days. My heart rhythm is dictated by a computer the size of quarter. I can think of many reasons for trust sciences more than not. For one, my faith in people is fairly good. Thinking that so countless professionals are in on a grand conspiracy which makes others ill for profit -- that is too cynical.

That's extremely cool that she still supports vaccination despite having a bad reaction to a shot. It would be easy for her to just be angry about it, instead she looks through to the data. Awesome

Thank you, this is interesting. I still can't see how the possible negative side effects are worse than the possibility of being infected wigh life-threatening diseases, though, even taking the "lying" statistics out of the picture and looking at this from a purely qualitative point of view.

I am happy too see that so many people here are familiar with Ben Goldacre's works! I'm in med school yet nobody there seems to have heard about him.

The immune reaction works in the same way. (Natural.) Except instead of exposing your child/yourself to the live foreign body, you are exposed to the dead remnants, so you have a far, far smaller chance of actually getting sick, and almost zero chance of getting life threateningly ill. There goes your ridiculous "in the olden days" argument. (In the olden days girls were also married off to men some 40 years their senior at the age of eleven, but I don't see you supporting that.)

Whaddup, I work in biochemistry, and worked for MSD (one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies around) during one of my internships.

I've also been vaccinated as a child and am autistic. My younger sister, who got the same shots I did, is not autistic.

Not vaccinating your child thins herd immunity, which jeopardises those who cannot be vaccinated for whatever reason. You also jeopardise your own child, exposing them to diseases that STILL cause a lot of troubles these days. There's a lady (Growing Up Unvaccinated, I can't link it because apparently I might be a spammer, it's at voicesforvaccines. org / growing-up-unvaccinated/) who speaks about her own childhood and life being unvaccinated.

I mean, ultimately it's your choice whether or not to vaccinate your child, but do fully realise that you are jeopardising your own, and other people's loved ones by not doing so.

Those words sound scary, so merit some explanation:

1. Febrile convulsions, though they sound bad, are a common symptom of fever in young children and are almost always harmless. The child has a small fit. It looks alarming, but is usually not serious. Your child is more likely to suffer from them if he or she actually becomes infected with measles, mumps or rubella and has a high fever.

2. Aseptic menigitis is commonly caused by the mumps virus. Again, you're much better off just not getting mumps. You're more likely to experience this from the mumps virus itself than from the vaccine.

3. Idiopathic thrombocytopaenic purpura is caused by viral infection. In children the most common symptom is nosebleeds. In children it gets better by itself in around 6 weeks. In adults it can be more serious. Again, you're much better off not getting the viral infection in the first place.

So to sum up, there can be complications but they're much less common than the complications caused by the diseases themselves. You should vaccinate your kids.

Ben Goldacre rocks!

It's so cool that you are in med school. I tried out for med school, passed the GAMSAT exams pretty well, but messed up on the interview. Best of luck with it!

You're welcome to define the injection of the dead remnants of foreign bodies into the veins of babes as "natural". The fact that I disagree with you does not make my disagreement "ridiculous". As another poster has said: those of us who have chosen not to vaccinate our children have had to get used to emotive hostility.


Not at all sure I see the point of this analogy.


Never heard of MSD. Do they produce vaccines as part of their charitable work?


So what?


I made a judgement call not to vaccinate my daughter. She was born with profound eczema and I didn't want to stress an already compromised immune system with vaccines. I authorised a tetanus shot in her early teens as another judgement call. When she got mumps recently she moaned to me about never having been vaccinated and asked me for further info as she was considering getting fully vaccinated (she's 21). I suggested Rubella might be useful but advised against MMR and told her to do her own research into vaccines.
I simply do not accept that I put others at risk by my judgement calls. If vaccines are so wonderful then why on earth does the vaccine lobby fear unvaccinated kids? No one - but no one - has ever given me a satisfactory answer to this.

I don't know about the "vaccine lobby" you mention (it sounds more like scaremongering than anything else), but the more people who are vaccinated, the harder it is for the viruses to survive in a natural reservoir of people. That is, the likelihood of a virus jumping from one infected person over to someone else decreases when the number of people susceptible to the infection are fewer and further between.

Vaccinating half the kids would mean that the spread of the virus between different people would be relatively unchecked.

How does my girl getting mumps affect the susceptibility of vaccinated kids to mumps?

You know that babies, dont get instantly vaccinated against everything, 10 seconds after birth?