Calling the Shots

Vaccination is back in the spotlight after a Sydney family were pursued by child protection services for refusing to vaccinate their newborn daughter for hepatitis B. The family believes that their their son faces greater danger from the aluminium in the vaccine than from the disease itself, which his mother carries.

From aluminium to viruses that cause AIDS, vaccines have been accused of containing all manner of harmful substances and their very efficacy has been called into question. No wonder the choice of whether to vaccinate is a fraught one for parents. At Babblebaby we believe in informed choices. So here are seven of the top charges levelled at vaccines, with our take on the facts.

1. Vaccines have never been tested.
Detractors say that vaccines have never undergone double blind crossover placebo study. Supporters say that this is impossible, because vaccines are not able to be tested in a double-blind setting as they have been proven to work. It is therefore unethical to withhold effective treatment for the purposes of research. According to the Australian government, before vaccines are made available for use they are rigorously tested in thousands of people in progressively larger clinical trials. These trials are strictly monitored for safety.

“All vaccines registered in Australia by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) are manufactured and tested according to strict safety guidelines and are evaluated to ensure they are efficacious, comply with strict manufacturing and production standards and have a good safety record,” claims the Department of Health and Ageing.
Some vaccinations have not been released in Australia after faults found with the vaccines overseas.

2. Vaccines contain toxic additives and heavy metals.
The anti-vaccination lobby claims that vaccines contain harmful substances like poisonous formaldehyde, aluminium which is linked with the development of Alzheimer’s disease and thiomersal, a mercury-based preservative which has been blamed for causing autism.

Formaldehyde: This chemical is used during the manufacturing process to kill live viruses in some vaccines. When the formaldehyde is removed, sometimes a trace amount may remain. While some of these chemicals might be harmful in large doses, medical experts claim that the trace amounts left in vaccines are too small to have a toxic effect.

Aluminium: Yes, aluminium is added to some vaccines to enhance the immune response. However, aluminium from vaccines is lower than everyday exposure from intake from diet or medications, such as antacids (Mylanta etc), and is well below the levels recommended by organisations such as the United States Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Thiomersal: Thiomersal (also known as thimerosal) is a mercury-based preservative that has been used in some vaccines since the 1930s to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination. Medical experts claim that the amount of mercury used in thiomersal is too minute to cause neurologic abnormalities, such as autism. But, they have taken the step of removed from childhood vaccines since the year 2000 as a precautionary measure. Interestingly, many vaccines such as MMR never contained thiomersal, although MMR is the vaccination most linked to autism by anti-vaccination groups.

3. Vaccines are contaminated with human and animal viruses and bacteria and could cause AIDS
Yes, vaccines do contain live viruses as viral vaccines require cells in which the attenuated vaccine viruses can be grown. The viruses in current viral vaccines are propagated in either the cells of chicken eggs (flu vaccines) or lab-grown cell lines, which are thoroughly screened for foreign agents such as other viruses or bacteria.

Some have argued that an oral polio vaccine used in the 1950s developed by Dr Hilary Koprowski) was contaminated with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a primate virus, thus causing HIV-1 in humans and the earliest cases of AIDS. Recent testing of the Koprowski vaccine found no contamination with SIV or HIV and the vaccine-AIDS argument is now thoroughly discredited.

4. Vaccines can cause serious immediate side effects.
No medication is completely safe. Most children will experience only mild side effects: fever, crankiness, tiredness, loss of appetite, and tenderness, redness, or swelling in the area where the shot was given. Seizures caused by high fever are most commonly reported after pertussis (whooping cough) and MMR vaccinations. Still, some parents are understandably frightened by these side effects.

A common theory is that the whooping cough vaccine causes brain damage. Older versions of the vaccine (pre-1970) were related to encephalopathy (brain injury), although rare. A 10yr study of the current acellular vaccines, has concluded that it was not the vaccine but pre-existing conditions that were responsible for the encephalopathy.
Any links to SIDS or mis-diagnosed shaken baby syndrome have been completely disproven

5. Vaccines can cause serious long-term side effects.
Vaccines have been blamed for the rise in diagnosis of conditions such as asthma, eczema, food allergies, chronic ear infections, diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome and the big one, autism.

It was proposed that the MMR vaccine caused autism or inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) by a group of researchers in the United Kingdom in 1998. They suggested that measles virus in the gut caused a new syndrome of IBD which resulted in decreased absorption of essential vitamins and nutrients through the intestinal tract. It was suggested that this in turn caused developmental disorders such as autism, or worsening of symptoms in children already diagnosed with autism, so-called ‘regressive autism’. Although this theory generated a lot of media attention, the few studies on which it is based have many significant weaknesses.

A review by the World Health Organization concluded that current scientific data do not show any causal link between the measles virus and autism or IBD. An extensive review published in 2004 by the Institute of Medicine, an independent expert body in the United States, also concluded that there is no association between the MMR vaccine and the development of autism. In 2004, 10 of the 13 authors of the original 1998 study (published in The Lancet) published a statement retracting the paper’s interpretation, stating that the data were insufficient to establish a causal link between MMR vaccine and autism. The Lancet subsequently retracted the original paper.

Nevertheless, some parents claim black and blue that their child dramatically changed following the immunisation. High profile campaigners such as Jenny McCarthy have called for the vaccine schedule to be changed.

There is no evidence that vaccines cause diabetes. Worldwide, there has been much research that has searched for a link between diabetes and immunisations and not found one. Changes in diet and lifestyle habits are thought to be behind the rise in diabetes.

6. Vaccinations don’t work. Vaccinated children still catch preventable diseases.
It is true that no vaccine is 100 per cent effective. For reasons related to the individual, not all vaccinated persons develop immunity. Most routine childhood vaccines are effective for 85 to 95 per cent of recipients. In Australia most cases of preventable diseases occur in immunised people as most people in Australia have been vaccinated.

Consider this scenario: In a high school of 1000 students, none has ever had measles. All but five of the students have had two doses of measles vaccine, and so are fully immunised. The entire student body is exposed to measles, and every susceptible student becomes infected. The five unvaccinated students will be infected, of course. But of the 995 who have been vaccinated, we would expect several not to respond to the vaccine. The efficacy rate for two doses of measles vaccine can be as high as 99%; so in this school, seven students do not respond, and they too become infected. Therefore, seven of 12, or about 58 per cent, of the cases occur in students who have been fully vaccinated.

Looking at it another way, 100 per cent of the children who had not been vaccinated got measles, compared with less than 1 per cent of those who had been vaccinated. Measles vaccine protected most of the students; if nobody in the school had been vaccinated, there would probably have been 1000 cases.

7. Vaccination is a corrupt industry
Australian doctors receive small payments from the government to promote vaccines. These include $6 for reporting vaccinations to the Australian Childhood Immunisation Register (ACIR), a national database which tracks vaccination status in our children; $18.50 on top of their Medicare rebate for vaccinating a child on time; and a bulk payment at the end of each year based upon them having a practice vaccination rate in excess of 80%.

Some may consider these incentives a re-imbursement for the time it takes to maintain immunisation paperwork and keep plentiful stocks of vaccines. Others see it as bribery.
In addition, anti-vaccination groups claim that pharmaceutical companies have paid for almost all vaccine research to date and are only motivated by profit. Vaccine making is not necessarily a profitable industry – vaccine makers are constrained to producing largely the same vaccines according to government specs, using manufacturing processes that have been held in place for years by regulations, and selling their finished product mostly for a single government price.

Further reading
Much of the information in this article is sourced from Myths and Realities: Responding to arguments against immunisation. A guide for providers by the Federal Department of Health and Ageing.

The Australian Vaccination Network provides anti-vaccination information and support. Neither Babblebaby nor the Australian Medical Association endorse this site.