6: The Anti-Vaxxx Movement Is Peaceful Protest

While it's true that social progress makes a big difference to how communicable diseases spread and their death tolls, one effect of vaccination programs is to enable social progress; just look at what's happening right now in Africa as efforts against malaria start to gain traction and a greater number of more effective working days per person become available because fewer people are at home, quivering with fever. It's obviously a mistake to ignore the impact of nutrition and sanitation on health, but the evidence is in: smallpox didn't disappear because we all got mysteriously healthier all of a sudden. We killed it with vaccination. 

There are those who argue that the risks from vaccination outweigh the benefits in modern society. While they often take herd immunity into account, what tey don;t take into account is the lack of evidence for much of the perceived risk from vaccination. For instance, SmartVax ascribes a 1 in 13 risk to vaccination-induced asthma.There's no evidence to support this: a 2002 study found that the tenuous link between some vaccines and asthma was "at least partially accounted for by health care utilization or information bias." But even if there were, take a look at the figures below to see what the odds are really like. A one in 13 chance of asthma — or a three in one chance of death by smallpox? How about a one in three chance of being blinded by measles? Or a nine out of 10 chance of having a baby with brain damage and permanent disabilities as a result of CRS? 

Death rate from smallpox (eradicated by vaccination 1980): 30 percent of patients. Disfigurement or disability rate from smallpox: "Patients who survive smallpox infection nearly always have multiple areas of scarring where each pock has been." (Source: Encyclopedia.com, 2006.) Death rate from measles pre-vaccination: around 2.6million deaths a year. Death rate from measles post-vaccination: around 145, 000 a year, or 10 percent of patients, especially young children and young adults. Disability or disfigurement rate from measles: around 30 percent, with complications including deafness, brain damage and blindness, and pneumonia.

READ Measles, Mumps And Rubella: What Are They Really Like?

Death rate from rubella: Very low, with or without vaccination. Most rubella problems arise from Congenital Rubella Syndrome (See below).

Disability or disfigurement from rubella: in children, nearly none. In adults, low, though ill effects can include arthritis, neuritis and brain damage. In pregnant women infected with rubella the risk of CRS is between 50 percent and 90 percent; CRS results in "a wide range of birth defects, including deafness, eye defects, cardiac defects, mental retardation, bone lesions, and other abnormalities."

Conclusion

The battle against reason in the anti-vaxxx movement has already demonstrated the potential to go out beyond odd and misguided into downright strange and sinister. The main arguments of the movement are false. Vaccines don't cause autism or developmental diseases. Thiomersal doesn't, the active ingredients in vaccines don't and neither does the Evil One, while we're ticking things off the list. Germs do cause communicable diseases and vaccines prevent their spread. The movement against vaccines isn't a brave upswell of people power against Big Pharma, the New World Order, or the Matrix. It's a cult, led by profiteering charlatans and scientifially illiterate panic-mongers. And they haven't just come for your money: they've come for your kids. Being vaccinated is the best way to keep yourself, your family and everyone else's families safe.