Vaccination
Vaccination is one of the greatÂest advances in the history of medicine (although many people doubt this), and saves millions of lives every year. While vaccines are remarkably safe, they do have possible side-effects. This is to be expected when we consider vaccines work by mimicking a serious disease so that our immune system mounts a response to it. Any substance capable of doing this has the potential to have adverse effects.
When the New Zealand government proposed vaccinating 540,000 children with the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella) the Immunization Awareness Society of New Zealand used figures from the 1996 New Zealand Immunization Handbook to estimate that it would result in:
- up to 81,000 cases of rash and fever (? measles vaccine).
- up to 15,420 cases of transient joint pain (? rubella vaccine).
- up to 5,400 cases of parotid swelling (? mumps vaccine).
- up to 216 cases of febrile seizures.
- up to 18 cases of thrombocytopenia, 2 of which would develop into the chronic form of the disease.
- up to 5 cases of aseptic meningitis.
This is 102,059, or 18.9% of the children being immunized. It should be noted that the majority of these complications are mild symptoms of these diseases, something you might expect with vaccination, which basically works by tricking the body into thinking it has the disease so it mounts an immune response. If someone has a severe reaction to a vaccine that is similar to the symptoms of the disease, then you have to consider the likelihood that the disease would have affected them severely too, and possibly far worse.
The infection rate of measles is around 90%, and the mortality rate is 0.1-0.2% for healthy children and up to 30% in children who are malnourished or immunosuppressed. If all 540,000 of the children in New Zealand were healthy but unvaccinated, a measles epidemic infecting 90% of them would cause between 486 and 972 deaths. 18.9% of those vaccinated having a mostly mild reaction from the vaccine is clearly a better outcome than the hundreds of deaths that would result from an epidemic of measles, so the New Zealand government decided that the benefits of the vaccine outweighed risks.1
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