Lines of Argument

*Extensive testing must be conducted to the vaccination prior to licensing it to for public use. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves and licenses the vaccines and continually monitors and test them for our safety.

*Vaccines that are optional have risks. These risks are close to none, but the chances of negative side effects are still there and vary from individual to individual, usually depending on their allergies.

*Of all deaths reported to VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) between 1990 and 1992, only one is believed to be even possibly associated with a vaccine. Each death reported to VAERS is thoroughly examined to ensure that it is not related to a new vaccine-related problem, but little or no evidence suggests that vaccines have contributed to any of the reported deaths. 

*There are some side effects of vaccines illustrated in these charts:

As parents find that their children develop diseases for no apparent reason, their minds seem to quickly conclude that vaccines are what could have done such damage.  Usually parents who come to this conclusion do not have evidence to back up their statement. The author of Vaccines, Arthur Allen, gives an example of this issue in his research:

Republican representative for Indiana, Dan Burton insisted that “unsafe vaccines” had caused his grandson to be autistic. Instead of doing his own research, he simply called the FDA, CDC, and NIH and accused them of “covering up associations of vaccines to disease” (Allen, 2007). There was no significant evidence involved in this instance, just strong accusations. The fact that Burton thought these companies would cover up something so prevalent in the lives of the entire human population is not exactly a strong argument considering those companies exist to keep us safe and healthy. Yes, they can be wrong sometimes. But Burton was quick to accuse of something that has been in the minds of many and continuously proven wrong. The representative also never specified which vaccines could have caused this disease in his grandson. He generalized all vaccines and implied that they were all harmful and produced negative effects.

Fraudulent Study linking MMR to Autism:  Andrew Wakefield published a study saying that the vaccine had caused damage to the intestinal lining of children, making harmful proteins enter the bloodstream and travel to the brain, resulting in autism.

In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published a fraudulent study linking the MMR vaccine to autism.  As a result MMR vaccination rates in the UK fell below the level of herd immunity and a disease that had once been declared under control in the UK was now declared an endemic.

Reasons why his work was determined fraudulent

*No scientist has been able to replicate his work

*He was paid a lot of money, by trial lawyers’ wanting to sue vaccine manufactures for vaccine injury, to do studies on autistic children

*He applied for a patent on a supposedly safer measles vaccine

Many studies have been done to see if vaccines really do cause autism and no association between MMR and autism have been found.  These studies include:

*Autistic children in the UK born after 1979 had their immunization data compared to the introduction of the MMR vaccine in 1988. 

*Children in Denmark born between January 1991 and December 1998 rates were compared between those who had received MMR and those who did not.  

*The UK showed that children with developmental disorders were less likely to have received the MMR vaccine before being diagnosed.

*CDC looked at immunization histories they collected from their education records and found that the distribution of children who had the MMR vaccine among children with autism were similar to other children.

*CDC looked at the association of the onset of autism in regression cases and the MMR vaccine.

*351 autistic children and 31 other children were screened to see if there was an association between the vaccine and their loss of social-communication milestones. 

After scientific evidence showed that MMR did not cause autism antivaccine activists shifted their focus to thimerosal, which is found in many vaccines, saying it was the cause of autism.  In 1999 thimerosal was removed from vaccines as a precautionary measure.  Studies that were done on thimerosal, and no evidence of a relationship was found, include:

*Infants who had received a vaccine containing thimerosal were tested and it was determined that their blood levels of mercury were below safe values, and the ethyl-mercury quickly left the blood stream.

*Thimerosal exposure was determined from electronic immunization registries, medical charts, and parent interviews. 

*In both Denmark and Sweden autism increased a lot after the discontinuation of thimerosal in 1992.

*Two groups of children were compared, one group received a vaccine containing a greater quantity of thimerosal and another group of children received a smaller quantity of thimerosal.