Why Vaccinate? Proven Utility in Prevention

"Vaccine injuries are rare."
"They are pharmaceuticals and people can react to them -- you can have a bad reaction to aspirin."
"We've been called all kinds of crazy things, including anti-vax."
"We're not. My law partner's sister spent her life in a wheelchair because she had polio. I wish she had that vaccine."
Renee Gentry, vaccine claims lawyer and director of a vaccine injury clinic, George Washington University Law School, Washington

"The overwhelming number of vaccine injections are completely safe and not associated with any adverse events."
"This is in marked contrast to what the anti-vaccine movement is trying to promulgate."
Dr. H. Cody Meissner, advisory commission official, National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, U.S.A.

Preparing a measles, mumps and rubella vaccine at the Rockland County Health Department in Haverstraw, N.Y.    CreditJohannes Eisele/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

After receiving a tetanus shot, 58-year-old teacher Angela Barry experienced intense pain, was barely able to lift her arm. Her condition became serious enough that she required cortisone shots, surgery and then months of follow-up physical therapy. Her medical costs were covered by the federal injury compensation program. Her experience failed to convince her that vaccinations might be dangerous. "I would not want anybody to hear this story and say, 'Oh, there's another reason not to go get vaccines'", she says. And so, she continues to get vaccinated.

Measles outbreaks in Israel, Ukraine, the Philippines and the United States have brought heightened attention to the failure of many parents to immunize their children. In the United States over the past dozen years or so, people have received roughly 126 million doses of vaccines against measles. At one time in the not-so-distant past, measles represented a disease infecting millions of American children. Measles killed 400 to 500 people every year.

More latterly, over a recent period of a dozen years, 284 people filed claims of having been harmed from the immunizations they received. A federal program to compensate people injured by vaccines was created to respond to those claims. And of those filed, about half of the claims were dismissed according to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, developed to cover claims related to 15 childhood vaccines as well as the seasonal flue shot.

Hundreds of millions of Americans have received billions of doses of vaccines over the past three decades. And the program has been used to compensate about 6,600 people in view of personal injury they claim to have been caused by vaccines. Even so, an estimated 70 percent of the awards were settled in instances where program officials failed to find sufficient evidence of fault attributed to vaccines.

Flu shots in recent years mostly involving adults have been involved in many of the program's pay-outs, to a total of $4.15 billion. About 520 death claims were compensated throughout the period of thirty years. Vaccines prevented over 21 million hospitalizations and 732,000 deaths among children over a twenty-year period, to place matters in perspective, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Data shows that should an individual contract measles the likelihood of serious harm is greater than the chance of injury from the measles vaccine. An estimated one in four people who contract measles are potential candidates for hospitalization, with one to two of every 1,000 people with measles likely to die from the disease. Claims of harm have been filed for about two of every million doses of the measles vaccine, as a counterpart to the foregoing.

From 2006 through to 2017, about two claims of injury for every million doses of all vaccines were filed. A list of injuries and conditions that might be caused by each vaccine includes fainting and brain inflammation, but autism is definitely absent from the list used by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Federal courts have ruled that evidence indicates conclusively that autism is not caused by vaccines.

On the other hand, the very existence of the program itself is cause to believe that vaccines are more dangerous than medical evidence indicates, according to the logic of vaccine opponents. "If vaccines do not cause injuries, why has the vaccine injury trust fund paid out $4,061,322,557.08 for vaccine injuries?", a Florida Republican Representative asked in a letter defending the right of parents to make their own decision on shots for their offspring.

The data itself speaks as evidence of vaccine safety, point out public health experts. Some half of all claims since 2017 relate to shoulder injuries, generally in adults, occurring as a result of a health provider injecting a vaccine too high on the shoulder, or into the joint space, rather than into muscle tissue, as is required by sound medical practise. A tax is levied by vaccine manufacturers of 75 cents per dose, and this tax finances the program.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention