The Risks Of Vaccination

There's always been concern that vaccination would cause rather than cure health problems. The first effective vaccine was cowpox, a mild disease in cows that immunised you against smallpox. If you got cowpox you couldn't catch smallpox and it was a much less dangerous disease, so an English doctor named Edward Jenner began infecting everyone he could get his hands on with cowpox. When word got out, the papers of the time were full of cartoons showing Jenner turning people into cows!

Fast forward to the modern world and similar concerns are still with us. In Taliban-held areas of Afghanistan and other countries, the Red Cross and the US are carrying out vaccination programs to lift the burden of infectious disease. The Taliban threaten to kill people who let their kids be vaccinated, warning that the vaccines contain poisons or that they are "un-Islamic". They also claim that the US and other groups are using vaccination programs as a cover for spying on the Taliban. Polio is endemic in only three countries in the world now, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, but in Pakistan and Afghanistan vaccines are now the subject of a "fatwa", a religious interdiction.

So far, so expected — turns out the Taliban are unreasonable, who knew?

The two biggest arguments that get raised against vaccination are that vaccines contain poisonous chemicals and that they cause diseases, primarily autism.

Let's take them one by one.

Do Vaccines Contain Poisonous Chemicals?

Yes they do. 

Vaccines contain mercury (as Thimerosal, a mercury salt), aluminium salts, residual cell culture materials from when the dead or disabled bugs were grown in the lab, formaldehyde and similar chemicals, and leftover antibiotics from the production process. Personally, if I was offered the chance to put something containing mercury, arsenic, antibiotics, formaldehyde and cell culture tissue into my mouth, I'd say no.

Wouldn't you?

See Also: Are Western Parents Bringing Back Scary Diseases By Rejecting Vaccines?

If you really feel that way, you need to stop eating meat, fish, eggs, dairy, vegetables and fruit, and stop drinking wine, beer, cola, fruit juice and drinking water, and even that won't solve the problem. Because when it comes to chemicals like formaldehyde, you actually make more formaldehyde inside your own body as side products of metabolic processes than you'd ever be exposed to in all the vaccinations you'd ever take. And mercury, which is in some fish at levels high enough to make the FDA concerned, is present in only one vaccine, the multi-dose flu vaccine, and there in literally trace amounts — amounts so small that it's not possible to say just how small they are. In some case they may not be there at all. If your mother ate sea fish, like tuna, she gave you more mercury that way than you'll ever get from a vaccination.

So you're not risking formaldehyde poisoning when you get your shots.