Your health is a deeply personal affair. Your habits, health care access, and family history all play a significant role.
However, one place where health care is generally uniform is vaccines. For now, we have a choice as to whether to take the new COVID-19 vaccine. Meanwhile, all states have a list of vaccinations for several diseases that are mandatory once children enter public school. Although most states allow parents to waive this requirement for religious or medical reasons, opting out is strongly discouraged.
To some health experts, vaccination is the most important advance in public health—right up there with indoor plumbing, and modern surgical techniques. Vaccinations are promoted as a type of preventative measure designed to protect the population from a variety of devastating illnesses.
Yet, despite the benefits that vaccines promise, this common procedure has become controversial.
The core issue is safety. Informational inserts that accompany vaccines warn of a long list of possible health risks, including death. However, health officials say such scenarios are rare and insignificant compared to the massive public benefits provided by vaccination programs.
“[Vaccines are] highly effective and very safe, when you look at risk-benefit ratio of a disease versus the very, very, very small risk of any adverse event that you would have with a vaccine,” Fauci said. “However, the motivation to get vaccinated is crystal clear and sharp when you look around you and you see people getting serious disease.”
IOM has also found that the research looking at vaccinations and adverse events doesn’t show adequate evidence to either accept or reject a causal relationship. The problem, says an IOM report, is that “studies designed to examine the long-term effects of the cumulative number of vaccines or other aspects of the immunization schedule have not been conducted.”
These are exactly the studies required to evaluate the true safety of the current vaccine schedule.
Regulators try to quell concerns by assuring the public that vaccines are rigorously tested. But the peculiar regulatory regime for these products invites suspicion. Unlike most other manufacturers, those that produce vaccines are protected from liability if their product is found to cause harm. In other words, they can’t be sued for not testing their products enough to find common side effects. This protection is granted through the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986, which instructs parents who seek compensation to try their case in a special vaccine court.
Comparative Study
As the schedule of mandatory vaccinations has grown, concerned parents, doctors, and advocacy groups have called for research that directly compares vaccinated to unvaccinated children. In 2013, the IOM joined the chorus when it issued a report instructing the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to perform this comparative study using patient information it already has from the Vaccine Safety Datalink.The study concluded that unvaccinated children were healthier than their vaccinated peers. The strongest relationships observed for vaccination status were for asthma (4.5 times more likely), developmental delays (twice as likely), and ear infections (twice as likely). No association was found for gastrointestinal disorders in the primary analysis, but a significant relationship was detected as vaccine doses accumulated.
“The results definitely indicate better health outcomes in children who did not receive vaccines within their first year of life,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Brian Hooker, in a press release. “Such findings merit additional large-scale study of vaccinated and unvaccinated children in order to provide optimal health as well as protection against infectious diseases.”
“All of them show dramatically better health in unvaccinated children,” Kennedy writes. “We have found no studies that show superior health outcomes in vaccinated children.”
The studies point to an alarming trend, but, by design, they merely show correlation, not causation. Furthermore, researchers from the most recent study note limitations with their data. For example, although their sample size was significant, the population it pulled from may not accurately reflect the general population.
Identifying Risk
Vaccine campaigns of the past (particularly polio) are noted for their strong public support. But even the most dedicated vaccine advocates admit that public confidence is falling. Immunization experts at the World Health Organization’s summit on vaccines in December 2019 highlighted the lack of “good science” and the inability of vaccine clinical trials to provide meaningful information about safety and risk.“The reason they don’t want to look at those susceptibility groups is that if they found them, no matter how big or small they were, that would scare the public away,” Healy said.
Healy, who died in 2011, remained a strong proponent of vaccines. She believed the public would too, especially if safer methods could be identified.
“If we identified a susceptibility group, identified a risk factor for vaccines, or if we found out that they should be spread out over a longer period of time, I do not think the public would lose faith in vaccines,” Healy said. “I think the public would respect that.”