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One argument used to discourage people from getting their immunizations is that only vaccinated people are getting the diseases they are supposed to be protected from by the vaccines. Initially this looks like a great argument. In fact people oftentimes claim that there is a government conspiracy afoot. Unfortunately, this statement is misleading and uninformed. The statement above is misleading due to the fact that people are all different. Not every persons immune system works exactly like everyone elses. Vaccines protect most but not all people. Some people do not respond well to vaccines. When given a shot their immune system, for any number of reasons, does not develop a protective immune response. Just because you got a vaccine does not guarantee you will never get the disease you were vaccinated against. It will however, GREATLY reduce your chances of getting the disease you were immunized against. In fact, most vaccines protect 80-95 percent of the people who get the vaccine. If vaccinations are not very effective then a very simple experiment could prove or disprove this hypothesis. Simply quit giving the vaccine to children and see how many develop the diseases you used to immunize against. This type of experiment would not be approved by any legitimate funding agency. However, about 2 decades ago many people were complaining about the whooping cough (pertussis) vaccine. Many were claiming the vaccine was causing neurological (brain and nervous system) problems in children. As a result of this outcry several countries in Europe and Japan decided to quit giving the whooping cough vaccine. Within 3 years thousands cases of whooping cough were being reported in those countries that decided to quit giving the vaccine. Hundreds of children died of this illness. At the same time many other countries disagreed and continued to give the whooping cough vaccine. No major outbreak of whooping cough was ever reporting in the countries that continued to use the vaccine. This simple and very misguided experiment proved that the whooping cough vaccine is very effective at preventing whooping cough. Now I am not saying that vaccines are perfectly safe. People do develop complications from these vaccines. However, the chances of dying from many of these diseases are much greater than the chance you will die from a vaccine. Now why is it that you have to take your baby at 2, 4, and 6 months to get their shots? Next week I will answer this question. Take Care and Think Microbiologically! Go To Page: 1 The copyright of the article Do Vaccines Really Protect Us? in Microbiology is owned by . Permission to republish Do Vaccines Really Protect Us? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing. | |
