We're looking at vaccines in a special issue of science
because there's been a
loud, if small, minority of vaccine
resistors who've been getting a lot of
play lately and we feel it's really
important to look at the facts and the
evidence around vaccines and the
tremendous public health benefit they've
delivered to us throughout the 20th
century and that they continue to do
I'm Meredith Wadman
I'm a reporter with Science magazine
One of the common misconceptions
around vaccines with hesitant parents
is this notion that
vaccines given in infancy can overwhelm
the baby's immune system or the
toddler's immune system even if you gave
a one-year-old 11 vaccines in one sitting
that stimulus to that child's immune
system would so-called "use up"
only 0.1 percent of the immune system at that
point in time so we are tremendously
evolved to fight foreign invaders and
and the number of vaccines is just not
consequential in terms of where our
immune systems abilities are.
when you look at the measles line what you see
there are literally millions of cases in
the middle of the 20th century going
down to thousands after the introduction
of the measles vaccine in 1963
Measles was no joke, it was no fun for an
ordinary kid to have it, but for certain
children, Measles could kill you.
you look now into the late decades of
the 20th century and Measles is more
or less going away there's a bump in
'91 or '92 when there's an
outbreak, but then you get in 1998 this
since proven fraudulent paper in
The Lancet from Andrew Wakefield suggesting
that there's a link that MMR,
the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine might cause
autism, but that had a really serious
impact on vaccination uptake
for a number of years
Vaccine Court is a court in Washington, D.C.
where a petitioner someone
who believes they have been injured by a
vaccine can bring a petition and seek
redress in terms of financial
compensation for that injury
They look at the evidence
and they decide what are
bona fide vaccine injuries
By far the most common injury
where a needle is
mistakenly inserted into the shoulder
joint rather than the upper arm and
causes a really painful and
long-lasting inflammation
The number of claims of
shoulder injuries is growing, I believe,
for a couple reasons
In 2005, the government added to the list
of vaccines against which one can bring
a claim at the vaccine court
the influenza vaccine and it so happened
that at that time the CDC also expanded
the recommendation for who should be
receiving that vaccine so as a result in
the last decade you've had more than a
billion with a 'B' doses of this vaccine
shipped more vaccines
more potential for injury
However, I think, one interesting
and salient point is that the court has
never found that a vaccine caused a
child to develop autism
There was a big group claim
of more than 5,000 families
involved in this in the first decade of
this century and the court just said
"There's no there there."
You could come away with a very
skewed perception that
vaccines are incredibly risky
In fact, it's the other way around
If you are infected with tetanus in this country
the mortality for any given individual
is at a risk of actually 13.2%
for any given person who contracts tetanus
the risk of getting a really severe
allergic reaction that can kill you
is somewhere between one to six in every
million doses of tetanus vaccine administered
The risk reward calculus is
pretty obvious I think
You'd do far better to get your tetanus vaccine