Vaccination makes some people uneasy, and it’s not just the needle - the alarming
claims we’ve all heard about the dangers of vaccines can make vaccination seem like
a big risk to take.
But humans’ perception of what’s risky is notoriously unreliable.
We tend to underestimate the risks of everyday hazards and worry too much about suffering
some highly unlikely misfortune.
In fact, 9% of Americans fear zombies, which don't even exist.
So it's not hard to see how lots of scary talk around vaccines can be paralyzing.
In reality, the risks posed by vaccine are really small.
In fact, because vaccines are preventative measures given to healthy people, they’re
designed to be safer and have fewer side effects than interventions like medication or surgery,
which doctors only resort to once someone is already suffering from a medical condition.
After chemotherapy, for example, nasty reactions are almost universal.
And one of every two men who use Viagra experience at least one side effect.
Yet the most common side effect of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine - a harmless, low-grade
fever - occurs in 1 out of every 6 recipients.
Less than 1 in 20 get a minor rash.
And super-serious reactions are super-rare; less than 1 out of every million recipients
suffers a major allergic reaction.
In fact, during your lifetime, you're about 3 times more likely to be killed by an errant
firework and 80 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to have a severe reaction
to the MMR vaccine.
So when the Center for Disease Control, World Health Organization, or your doctor calls
a vaccine “safe,” they aren’t saying it will never trigger any bad reactions; they
simply mean that its risks are overwhelmingly outweighed by its benefits.
And vaccines are incredibly beneficial – shots for MMR, meningitis, and chickenpox reduce
the risk of getting sick by at least 85%.
Plus, vaccinating healthy people prevents nasty germs from spreading to those that are
too young or weak to get vaccinated themselves.
Overall, vaccines have reduced the number of whooping cough cases in the US by 97.5%,
slashed the worldwide incidence of polio by more than 99%, and eradicated smallpox.
But this success comes with its own side effects: as fewer and fewer people witness - or experience
- the effects of these nasty diseases, it becomes easier to fixate on the risks of vaccines
than to recognize their benefits.
However, an encounter with illness can help put things into perspective.
After a rash of measles spread through 27 U.S. states in 2014 and early 2015, attitudes
shifted nationwide: over a third of Americans polled said they now viewed vaccines more
favorably.
And where outbreaks were particularly bad, behavior changed too; in hard-hit Clallam
County, WA, vaccination rates quadrupled.
Any increase in vaccination rates is great for those that become protected - either directly
or through herd immunity - but it doesn’t help people who are already sick.
It's better to learn, before you get sick, about how small the risks of vaccinations
are compared to the risks of disease.
Because these guys are what you should really be worried about.