Snow Leopard
Hibernating
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- 5,902
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- South Australia
Vaccines in western countries are victims of their own success. The risk of me getting polio in Australia is basically zero. Mumps, HIB, etc are very rare. There are only a few hundred measles cases each year and deaths are unheard of.
The fact is that we don't know how common or rare adverse effect are because we don't have any gold standard evidence. For example, to demonstrate in a RCT that a particular adverse effect is rarer than 1/500 (0.2%) doses, 50/50 enrollment, alpha of 0.95, beta of 0.05 (95% confidence for both type I and type II errors) and a base incidence of say 0.4% it requires a sample size of over 64,000 (32,000 in each group). Want to figure out the risks of 1/1000? forget about it...
http://clincalc.com/Stats/SampleSize.aspx
The sad part is that only the most recent vaccines have even had RCTs conducted to demonstrate their efficacy (and an attempt to demonstrate the risk profile).
That recent autism study only had the power to rule out (at 95% confidence) that at most 1/2 autism cases are due to the vaccine. (assuming final incidence of 0.6%)
The actual risk is probably much lower than that, but we don't have evidence to really know what the true risk is (if any risk at all) from RCTs as the sample sizes are too low to rule out type II errors for rare events with any sort of statistical confidence.
This is why such studies don't say there is no risk, they say 'we did not find a risk', or 'this drug/vaccine has a 'good' safety profile', but they do not state the limits of their study - beta or power level (for type II errors of adverse drug effects).
I don't believe that many or most autism cases are due to the vaccine, but that is an opinion, not a fact based on evidence (such as controlled studies, or population based studies).
So we fall back to vaccine surveillance. The USA has a no-fault compensations scheme, so the claim is that the rates reported are much higher than the real rates.
I personally was harmed by a vaccine when I was 15. That was the trigger for this illness. I have never had any of the viruses or pathogens that others talk about here (from Ross River virus, to EBV/CMV, to Lyme or anything else).
I was initially investigated for Guillain Barre syndrome (eg I had difficulty walking, had minor numbness of the extremities, etc). We saw multiple doctors and not one of them was willing to report it as a vaccine injury. In the USA we probably would have lawyered up and demanded that it was, but in Australia this was a difficult thing to do.
I see a common thread on this forum - vaccine triggers for CFS were not reported in the vaccine surveillance programs.
The risks for the individual may be higher for the vaccine than the risk of the illness in western countries. But for the risks to be that low, herd immunity must be maintained.
So what we have is unquantified risks of vaccines vs the government who desperately wants to maintain herd immunity and therefore either wants to force people to be vaccinated (Australia, California), or promote the idea that the risks of vaccines have a far better safety profile than can be claimed from the high quality evidence alone.
I might be biased to believe that vaccines have much higher risks than they really have, since one ruined my life, but the truth is that we don't really have high quality evidence to quantify the (rare) risks yet.
We know that vaccines can induce autoimmunity. Why? Because the methods used to induce autoimmune models in rats/mice use either the adjuvants found in vaccines, or vaccines themselves. The old pertussis vaccine for example is used as part of a standard protcol to induce illnesses such as Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis. Likewise, Freund's adjuvant is basically a TB vaccine.
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