Doctors are speaking out now to halt a disturbing trend. A small but growing minority of parents are turning against the vaccines given to children. They believe the risks of side effects from the vaccines are a greater danger to their kids than the diseases the vaccines are supposed to protect against.
Doctors Say Vaccine Fears Are Unfounded
Parents Wonder: Is It Safe to Vaccinate?
How can this be happening? After all, vaccines have tamed many of the deadly microbes that once crippled and killed people by the hundreds, even the thousands, just a few decades ago. Do you have any friends or schoolmates who’ve ever had smallpox, polio, whooping cough, diptheria or rubella? Probably not—you might not have even heard of some of these diseases, they’re so uncommon these days.
And that’s one reason some parents are now more fearful of the vaccine than the disease. It’s not that common anymore in developed countries for families to lose children to infectious disease. Because the diseases are so rare, they’re not as scary as they used to be. So the need for vaccines doesn’t seem as urgent.
Another reason is stories about side effects possibly linked to vaccines. In some cases, side effects have been shown to be real concerns. For example, a very tiny fraction of kids given a polio vaccine taken by mouth developed polio. Ten kids out of 4 million (4,000,000) developed the disease each year. But since a safer polio vaccine given as a shot is also available, even 10 children developing a crippling disease is too many. Now only the injected vaccine is used. A new vaccine that protects against diarrheal disease was taken off the market this year after a small number of children developed health problems linked to the vaccine. Some experts argue that the relatively small number of cases of this bowel problem should not have stopped all use of the vaccine since diarrheal diseases kill 750,000 kids each year worldwide, a much greater number than those who get the bowel problem.
But other so-called side effects may or may not be linked to vaccines. For example, some people worry that the measles vaccine might lead to autism (a condition affecting the brain). Some believe the hepatitis B vaccine may cause rare, sudden death in babies.
The problem is that there is no scientific evidence to prove the link between these problems and the vaccines. There are stories from a few parents whose children have had health problems that they believe happened because of a vaccine, mostly because the problem appeared around the time their child received the vaccine.
The majority of doctors believe such cases are only coincidence. It may be that there is actually a rare link between a vaccine and a side effect. But scientific studies are needed to prove or disprove such links.
All parents understandably want to protect their kids from harm—your parents would do eveything they could to keep you from danger. So if a disease is uncommon and if there’s even a suggestion that a vaccine could lead to some kind of health problem, it may seem logical to some parents to avoid having their children vaccinated. But they are probably exposing their kids to more danger by doing this.
The more kids who go unvaccinated, the greater the risk of diseases we’d once tamed coming back to harm us. Studies have shown that children who are not vaccinated get diseases at a higher rate than kids who are vaccinated. The article linked from this page notes that when the U.S. relaxed on measles vaccination in 1989, 55,000 people across the country got the disease and 120 died.
For more information on vaccines, their safety and possible risks, visit the Centers for Disease Control Vaccine Safety page.
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