Vaccines are not 100% safe and effective. No one is debating this statement. If they were, the government would not have passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act and started a compensation program for those injured by childhood vaccines. (In addition, the act prevented parents from suing physicians who administer shots or companies who manufacture them.) Also, if vaccines were 100% safe, there would be no consent forms enumerating possible risks, ranging from pain at the injection site to death.
Parents should take the decision for each immunization into serious consideration, and arrive at a decision based on a careful weighing of risks. However, most choose to blindly accept the recommendations of the pediatrician. Unfortunately, doctors administering vaccines do not have a history of infallibility.
Consider the DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) immunization. Today, it has been mostly replaced with the more effective and less toxic DTaP, using acellular pertussis. The original pertussis vaccine made from whole cells used in DPT contained a high level of endotoxins carried by the disease. Most people vaccinated with DTP ran a fever, and it had a high level of more severe complications, such as brain swelling, shock, and death. In addition, its effectiveness was always in question, since some of those vaccinated still got the disease. Articles about dangers and problems with the DPT vaccine can be found in medical journals almost every year from the 1930s until the 1980s, yet the public was none-the-wiser, and doctors continued to give the shots with a smile. In 1990 the Institute of Medicine (IOM) stated that there was good evidence that DPT could cause brain disease, but the DPT vaccine was never recalled. Whole cell DPT is still manufactured today, despite the fact that the vast majority of compensation the government has given to vaccine victims has been for this particular shot.
Also, consider the rotavirus vaccine, removed from the recommendation list in 1999 -- after it had begun to be administered to the population -- because it was linked to a dangerous intestinal problem.
And what about Gulf War Syndrome, suffered by soldiers who were forced to undergo a tremendous battery of vaccines, including vaccines for botulism and anthrax, prior to going to war in the Middle East? The dangers of this experiment are just now being speculated upon, after a generation of soldiers and their descendants have already been affected.
Before it was replaced with the injectable form, the oral polio vaccine was known to cause outbreaks of polio. Since polio infection could be spread by mouth, changing the diaper of an infant who had recently received the oral vaccine could result in polio infection.
Obviously, doctors cannot always be relied upon to have the answers. Through the years, mistakes have been made, medicines and vaccines have been released and then recalled, and the medical community has debated the dangers of treatments without disclosing their concerns to the public.