Are vaccines dangerous?

Vaccines are only dangerous if you have an allergy to one. My own daughter is allergic to the flu vaccine, and we know this because she had a severe allergic reaction to it when she got her first shot at six months old. That's the only vaccine she doesn't get. That doesn't mean all vaccines are dangerous or the risks are too

high.  The risks are quite low, actually - according to PublicHealth.org only about 1 case (of severe allergic reaction) in one to two million injections (that's like 0.000001 percent!).

What do people have against vaccines?

There have always been people against vaccination, for various reasons, but the "new wave" started in 1998 with the famous publication of Andrew Wakefield's paper linking the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps, rubella) to "developmental regression" in children. This soon has evolved (or devolved in this case) into "vaccines cause autism". The thing is that Wakefield made up the whole study and was even stripped of his medical license - he is no longer a doctor. It was discovered that he was developing his own "one vaccine cures all" remedy and so probably was trying to discredit other vaccines to eventually show that only his worked.

There has not been one single credible study ever since linking vaccines to autism or "developmental regression".

https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/do-vaccines-cause-autism

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136032/

What about toxins found vaccines?

Formaldehyde, mercury, and aluminum - aren't these chemicals toxic? Yes, at a certain level, not the trace amounts found in vaccines.

But, what's so good about vaccines?

It is thanks in great part to vaccines that people don't die young anymore. Thanks to vaccines millions of people are saved from smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, rabies, rubella, anthrax, plague, tuberculosis, polio, typhoid, yellow fever, whooping cough, measles, influenza, meningitis, hepatitis, tetanus, encephalitis, and the chickenpox,  

The more people are vaccinated, the more resistant we become as a group (like, as a population). We are not immune to these diseases, but we are more resistant - less able to be affected. The opposite is true though: the more people that aren't vaccinated, the more at risk everyone is because resistance lowers.

Bottom line:

Scientific research over decades has proven that vaccines are safe and that they work.

Learn More:

• Anti-Vaxxers are not new and go back as far as the 1800s when mandatory vaccination started. More on the history on vaccination and anti-vaccination: Skeptoid.com.
• The whole Andrew Wakefield fraud: NIH.gov.
• Vaccine myths debunked: PublicHealth.org.