Anti-Vaxxer Sympathy

[Aractus]

I can't speak for Aus, but in the US ever since vaccinations were tied to autism (falsely)

I've pointed out many times that the Wakefield et al. 1998 (ret.) paper only deals with the MMR vaccine.

The MMR vaccine has since been vetted.

However other vaccines have been withdrawn from the market, some of them following adverse effects (there was one such case in 2010, with numerous hospitalisations and at least one death! ). That flu vaccine was deemed unsafe. Not by tinfoil-hat wearing loonies but by the Health department and the State and Commonwealth governments. So the question that patients rightly ask is "why did they ever allow a potentially dangerous vaccine on the market in the first place?" And the simple answer is that vaccines are NOT held to the same standards as other pharmaceuticals when it comes to ensuring their safety. The argument of course being that "you can't wait 6 years for clinical trials because the virus will mutate" - and of course it it will, and therein lies the problem. There is no way to demonstrate that a vaccine is safe - unless there has been clinical trials, or unless it has already been used for a number of years without problem. Many people question the ethics of allowing potentially problematic medicine to be administered in the first place.

And by the way, I'm not making anything up - the TGA has a specific committee to deal with assessing the safety of vaccines. The have a specific information page for reporting adverse effects following vaccines or medication, note what they say on that page "You don't need to be certain, just suspicious!".

You have a completely romanticised view of medications and vaccines. Sadly things do go wrong. And any negative experience causes distrust in the healthcare consumer. The fact that you can't move on from the MMR-autism debate (and you misquoted it) and recognise that it's not by any means the pillar of irrational vaccine fear shows your views on the issue are clouded by a clear belief-bias.

IF the government does get all decisions about the safety of vaccines right ALL of the time you would have a point - but the fact is they do not. It is very unlikely that such an event will ever personally affect an individual person - but that doesn't stop people from buying lottery tickets either. And people do have an expectation that they do not have to tolerate the possibility of a TGA-approved medication being unsafe.


The issue you have is that you seem to think that people who have a fear of vaccines are all linked to believing that the MMR vaccine can trigger autism. If that was true it doesn't explain why people have a fear of other vaccines that aren't the MMR vaccine. As I've just explained there are plenty of other valid reasons for people to fear vaccines.