The safety of vaccines

Are the risks of the vaccine worse than the risk of disease?

• No, it’s not even close. Vaccine preventable diseases can kill you
• Severe adverse events from vaccines are extremely rare and are closely monitored and tracked nationwide. Eg: risk of anaphylactic reaction are literally 1 in a million doses of vaccine given

Do you know? Vaccines are one of the most monitored and studied things in medicine because they are given to healthy children.

It’s just like…Worrying about the risks of the vaccine rather than the disease it prevents is a bit like being outside and constantly looking skyward because you are afraid you may get hit by an aircraft. As a result, you get hit by a car. Try not to focus on the wrong risk!

What about vaccine components?

Vaccines are made with ingredients that make them safe and effective. Components in vaccines are used in very small amounts and their use has not been linked to disease or illness.

Did you know? Thimerosal is no longer present in childhood vaccines, with the exception of influenza. It was removed because of public perception that it was problematic, not because of safety concerns.

Vaccines are made up of many components:

• Formaldehyde - naturally occurring in the human body and helps with your metabolism. There is approximately 10 times the amount of formaldehyde in a baby’s body at any time than there is in a vaccine.
• Aluminum - the most abundant element in the earth's crust, it is found in air, food and water. Aluminum salts help vaccines to work faster, better and longer. Aluminum is present in breast milk and in infant formula in similar amounts as vaccine. This amount is very small and extremely safe for infants.
• Gelatin is contained in some vaccines, but is prepared from cows known to be free of mad cow disease.
• Abortions are not performed to make vaccines. Some vaccines are made from cells that came from an aborted fetus in the 1960s. The fetus was not aborted to make the vaccine, but had been aborted for a medical reason. The cell line is replicating but the original cells have not been used ever since.

Is there a connection between thimerosal in childhood vaccines and autism?

No - studies have shown that there is no link between thimerosal and autism.

Much of the increase in autism is due to a broader definition and inclusion of behaviours and learning disorders that previously had no specific diagnosis that now fall under what is known as autistic spectrum disorders.

Thimerosal is a safe and effective preservative that has been used in some vaccines since the 1930s. There has never been any scientific evidence that it is harmful in the extremely small amounts used to preserve vaccines.

With the exception of influenza vaccine, thimerosol has been removed from all routine childhood vaccines.

Does MMR vaccine cause autism?

No - there is no increased risk of autism with MMR vaccine.

Because children with autism are often diagnosed at around the same time as they get their shots, people sometimes think that it’s related to the shots themselves. Just because some things happen close together doesn’t mean that they are related.

It’s just like ... eating a ham sandwich and going out and getting hit by a car. The ham sandwich did not cause the car to hit you.

There are lots of studies that show that MMR does not cause autism. A study of 500,000 children in Denmark showed that the likelihood of autism was the same in kids who were immunized as those who weren’t.

• The consequence: After the MMR/autism scare in the late 1990’s, the number of children immunized with MMR in the UK fell significantly.
• The result was 1600 cases of measles, 350 children hospitalized and three previously healthy children died.