Vaccines Kill

Now in this particular pair of cases, there\’s no evidence of a causal relationship.

Two girls have died suddenly after being given the vaccine against the virus which causes cervical cancer, the European drugs watchdog has revealed.

But before the anti-vaccination crowd (with this specific one that crowd is expanded by those who claim that vaccinating against a sexually transmitted disease will lead to more people having sex.  Given that the vast majority of people do in fact go on to have sex at some point in their lives this isn\’t really all that strong an argument) leap upon this as evidence that the programme must be stopped, some news just in.

All vaccination programmes kill people.

Yes, really. Everyone in medicine knows this, everyone in government (that part of it that understands the subject, at least) knows this. We have a compensation scheme for those killed or damaged by vaccinations. (Here\’s the US reporting system.)

What we actually do here is use, well, you can call it accounting, call it economics, but it\’s a cost benefit analysis. Say that one in a million die from the vaccine (not all that far off the true number for some of them I think). How many are saved by having the vaccine? A multiple of that, many times.

Yes, vaccination kills people and non-vaccination kills many more. That\’s why we vaccinate.


5 thoughts on “Vaccines Kill”

  1. MMR jabs might not cause autism, but neither should we automatically rule out any aspects of our modern environment that trigger or exacerbate latent Autistic proclivities.

  2. That was a mouthful, Sorry.

    My eldest child had the MMR jab and is on the Autistic spectrum. I don’t think these facts are related and our other two children were also given the MMR jab to no ill effect.

    But there does appear to be a rise in the incidence of Autistic Spectrum Disorders in the developed world. It can’t all be down to better detection and identfication.

    Tim adds: Assortative mating. Rootle around here for “autism”.

  3. You’re probably correct, Tim, but I’m not sure that ALL vaccination programmes would pass such a cost-benefit analysis.

    People credit vaccines with more of the fall in major killer diseases than is justified. In fact, in western countries, around 95% of the fall occurred before mass vaccination. The reason? Clean water supplies and better sanitation and living conditions.

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