The Dangers of Vaccines

Anti-vaccination is not about offering a choice, it's about removing a well established and proven safety net for everyone. Vaccines have all but eradicated some very serious illnesses, like polio and whooping cough.

Many who were born prior to these vaccines existing, or who have conditions preventing vaccination, are kept safe only if the rest of the population is vaccinated. Also, a vaccine does not always prevent you from contracting the illness due to biological factors.

The idea is called "herd immunity," and it requires that the majority of the herd be made immune. This is extremely important in light of how dense our population centers have gotten due to over population.

The only way to justify offering parents a choice to endanger the entire population is by discrediting vaccines. To date, no one has come forward with any empirical evidence suggesting any major risks are associated with vaccines.

Let's look at autism first, a common claim is that vaccines cause autism yet these people who make this claim are only looking at numbers increased by medical advances which allow for better diagnosis. Most autistic people would remain unnoticed in the past, often dismissed as just "slow," "unsocial," etc.

Today we know that autism is a spectrum and many instances remained undiagnosed in the past, a vast majority of autistic people suffered in silence. We also know it's genetic, as for exactly how it's contracted, there is still some debate among scientists.

It is jot something you contract later in life, you are born autistic or not, that we do know for certain. So there is no connection to vaccines in any way, we just know more about autism now.

Another that is being linked to vaccines by the deluded anti-vaxxers is SIDS. A horrible event in which an infant dies for no apparent reason. The fallacy here is in the abuse of the term, ironically.

SIDS is not an illness, it is like the term UFO, it means we don't know what caused it. With today's media, even known causes of death are often called SIDS, which illustrates my point very well.

Media is rarely a source of facts, and media is also the only real driving force of anti-vaccine. The cases of actual SIDS should be lower, but parents are often too lazy or dishonest to have a full investigation done, usually the parents are directly at fault.

Seizures seem to be a new one, okay, there is a possibility of this being true. However, the chemicals that can cause those are no longer present in vaccines, oops.

A very common tactic of the anti-vaxxer is to present old, outdated, even outlawed vaccine formulas. Modern vaccines use only demonstrably safe chemicals, chemicals present in almost all medicine, food, and living organisms.

They avoid the modern formulas, even denying that those are used now. This is a display of cognitive dissonance, remove the chemicals that have low overdose levels and they lose their entire argument.