| No one can claim vaccines are "safe". Of course not, but they do anyway as I'm sure you must know! Imagine someone who is just starting to worry about vaccines does a google search and ends up on this top result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_hesitancy It says: "Arguments against vaccination are contradicted by overwhelming scientific consensus about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.[5][6][7][8]" The first citation for this claim is an article on the WHO website which quotes Dr Giovanni Rezza, Director of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Italy’s National Institute of Health. He says: "The media often sets up a false opposition between public health officials and anti-vaccination campaigners, rather than conveying a clear message that there is an overwhelming scientific consensus in favour of nationally recommended vaccines" Scientists are quite happy to insist that there's no debate to be had at all; this is very far from it being all about relative risks which reasonable people can disagree on. Unless the "anti-vaxxers" are basing their arguments upon quantitative data, then I'll continue to view them as crackpots with little knowledge or understanding. I assume any anti-vaxxer with any knowledge would cite a case like Pandemrix, which does have quantitative data. In fact DanBC provided some: maybe 5000 long term cases in the USA if everyone had been vaccinated. But I think you must admit, clear data is a luxury that nobody seems to have about viral spread. The numbers for how many people got Swine Flu vary dramatically depending on who you ask, even today. If I were asked to support an anti-vaxxer in a debate, I'd point out there's no reason to believe scientists can accurately weigh the costs and benefits of vaccines given their inability to even tell us accurately how many people die of the flu each year, and the fact that diseases caused by vaccines only become widely accepted years after the fact. |