Is It Safe?

Anyone who develops vaccines for a living has been faced with the question: are vaccines really safe? (Short answer: almost always.) Less often, and more ominously, one has to face not questions, but accusations of profiteering at the expense of children's safety and foisting on people deadly concoctions. I refuse to participate in such one-sided debates. As a scientist, I was trained to deal in facts, and in the absence of facts a true debate cannot exist and a prudent person - scientist or not - should keep their mouth shut. So the best I can do is present the facts to such people, trusting that they are discerning enough to choose facts over accusations. More specifically, choosing facts in the right context. What if I were to talk about a product that contains phosphoric acid and a psychoactive alkaloid? Sounds nasty, but that's any given cola product. My point is that any product can be presented in an unfavorable light. Yet, the anti-vaccine groups never acknowledge that vaccines have saved tens of millions of lives in the hundred or so years since they were invented. A credible case can be made that vaccines have saved more human lives on aggregate than any other medical advance.

Sadly, there is a growing contingent of people who are demonizing vaccines. Many of them are parents refusing to vaccinate their children because they have read (on the Internet?) or heard (on the television?) that vaccines are responsible for untold horrors. Take autism for example. I'm sure this is heartbreaking for any parent, and my sympathy and support goes out to them. No one knows what causes autism, but since nearly all children diagnosed with this condition have been vaccinated at some point in their young lives, vaccination "must" cause autism. But numerous studies have shown that there is no link there. (Post hoc ergo propter hoc.) To those parents who refuse to vaccinate their children against measles, diphtheria, tetanus and any number of agents because of some nebulous "fear" of vaccines is to willfully ignore both current facts as well as history.

Consider this. Vaccines are literally the only class of pharmaceutical (using the broadest sense of the term) that is routinely administered to large numbers of healthy individuals. All other medicines are intended to be used to treat some sort of malady. Because of this, a certain degree of risk is considered acceptable given that the risk should be balanced by the intended benefit. Not so with vaccines. The intent here is to prevent a disease that has not yet been realized. All companies developing vaccines know this, and they likewise know that the safety bar set by FDA is high indeed. Clinical trials with vaccines include thousands of volunteers expressly to look for rare adverse effects from vaccination. What better evidence that FDA sees vaccine safety testing as important?  [To the conspiracy buffs out there, I would remind you that you can't argue that FDA is actively preventing Americans from access to life-saving medicines while at the same time working with the shadowy "Big Pharma" to line their pockets with filthy lucre.]

Are there unsafe vaccines? Of course there are, just like any type of medicine. The difference is, there are vanishingly few vaccines where safety concerns outweigh their intended benefit, so these get weeded out fairly early in development. For those rare few that make it to licensure and only then exhibit safety issues, these are almost always extremely rare. From a risk:benefit equation, it might be easy to make a case that controlling some infectious disease in thousands or millions of people (including, yes, children) is worth the risk to a few individuals. Yet, such vaccines still get withdrawn. We live in a society with low tolerance for risk. Shunning vaccines will not advance that agenda. Rather, reducing or eliminating vaccines will put our world at far greater risk of death from infectious disease than we can ever imagine.

--R.V. House