cthulhu wrote:The funny part is that the most dangerous ones are generally only issued if you're going to go do something absurdly dangerous, like roll around in Laotian rice paddies and thus run the risk of a variety of run infections.
Otherwise the risk of death or serious injury from the vaccine is much, much lower than your chance of catching and dying to the actual illness.
This is not correct.
For example, an American is more likely to suffer a horrid complication from the DTAP vaccine than to acquire diptheria.
Vaccines work on a societal level by preventing outbreaks. In some cases this is effective enough that yes, the vaccines are causing more direct harm than the diseases they are otherwise preventing.
Stopping vaccinations generally leads to some kind of outbreak, but the effects of those outbreaks are very context-dependent. Countries with quality medical systems and high participation rates don't suffer tremendously from such outbreaks and even then, a lot of such correlations (no vaccines = deadly outbreak) aren't really based on robust data.
For example, the Irish measles outbreak in 2000 led to three deaths (1/530) but resulted from something like 5 years of vaccination rates even lower than the normally-low Irish vaccination rates; the MMR vaccine has something around a 1/40M mortality rate. Still, since then, Ireland continues to have low vaccination rates and sporadic outbreaks, with no deaths this past two years despite yet another outbreak.
You can find a similar example in pertussis. Sweden has a pretty high incidence rate with very low mortality, since they banned pertussis vaccination for around 20 years until they had an acellular version. Meanwhile, in the US, where you're supposed to be immunized and there's less vigilance, outbreaks have killed a handful of people of the last few years. In the developing world, hundreds of thousands of people (predominantly children) die from pertussis every year.
