Debunking The Myths Of Vaccinations

Vaccination often gets bad press. Many link it to cause autism, having serious side-effects or just being flat out ineffective. But this is not true! Here’s a quick guide to help you separate fact from fiction!

Why should children receive vaccination?

•  Vaccination had proven to reduce disease occurrence and death rates tremendously!¹
• Vaccines protect children and others as well. When a person gets an infectious disease, the disease might spread from person to person, but not to a vaccinated child.  A vaccinated child would not get infected and would not spread it to others. Besides protecting the vaccinated child, disease spreading is also contained, thus disease outbreaks could be prevented.¹

Figure 1: How vaccines protect children and others?

Debunking misconceptions about vaccination ^{2, 3}

Myth #1: Vaccines are unsafe.

• People have concerns over the use of formaldehyde, mercury or aluminum in vaccines. It’s true that these chemicals are toxic to the human body in certain levels, but only trace amounts of these chemicals are used in Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved vaccines.
• According to the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), formaldehyde is produced at higher rates by our own metabolic systems and there is no scientific evidence that the low levels of this chemical, mercury or aluminum in vaccines can be harmful.

Myth #2: Vaccines cause autism.

• Originated with a 1997 study published by Andrew Wakefield, a British surgeon. The paper has since been completely discredited due to serious procedural errors, undisclosed financial conflicts of interest, and ethical violations. Andrew Wakefield lost his medical license and the paper was retracted.
• Nonetheless, the hypothesis was taken seriously, and several other major studies were conducted. None of them found a link between any vaccine and the likelihood of developing autism.

Myth #3: Natural immunity is better than vaccine-acquired immunity.

• In some cases, natural immunity results in a stronger immunity to the disease than a vaccination.
• However, the dangers of this approach far outweigh the relative benefits. If you wanted to gain immunity to measles, for example, by contracting the disease, you would face a 1 in 500 chance of death from your symptoms. In contrast, the number of people who have had severe allergic reactions from an MMR vaccine, is less than one-in-one million.

Myth #4: Vaccines can infect my child with the disease it’s trying to prevent.

• Vaccines can cause mild symptoms resembling those of the disease they are protecting against. A common misconception is that these symptoms signal infection.
• In fact, in the small percentage (less than 1 in one million cases) where symptoms do occur, the vaccine recipients are experiencing a body’s immune response to the vaccine, not the disease itself.

Myth #5: Giving a child multiple vaccinations for different diseases at the same time increases the risk of harmful side effects and can overload the immune system.

• Available scientific data show that simultaneous vaccination with multiple vaccines has no adverse effect on the normal childhood immune system.
• A number of studies and reviews have been conducted to examine the effects of giving various combinations of vaccines simultaneously. These studies have shown that the recommended vaccines are as effective in combination as they are individually, and that such combinations carry no greater risk for adverse side effects.
• Research is under way to find ways to combine more antigens in a single vaccine injection (for example, measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) and chickenpox). This will provide all the advantages of the individual vaccines, but will require fewer shots.

Figure 2: How do vaccines work? ³

Vaccination Schedule by the Ministry of Health Malaysia ¹