I am pro-vaccine. I just wanna get that out there. That said, I have seen a lot of anti-vaccine activists making arguments and supporting themselves by citing the package insert-somewhat erroneously.
For starters, those inserts are not like food labels; that is, they are not meant to educate the general public. For one, they are geared toward medical professionals. They are not written in lay language. Two, they are mostly a legal document. They have to tell the ingredients. When it comes to side effects, that's where the confusion starts. You see, during a clinical trial, any symptom that develops is assumed to be from the experimental drug. If a test subject reports that he farted, then "flatulence" will be listed as a side effect. It does not matter if the symptom is actually related to the drug. If I were in a trial right now, and was asked if I had pain, I would have to tell them my foot hurts. They would put "foot pain" as a side effect of the drug-even though I broke my damn foot last week, and THAT is why it hurts.
Because they are not written in lay language, a lot of people misinterpret. When the insert says, correctly, that a small number of patients don't respond, people take that to mean that the vaccine never works and is useless. While we're on that subject, many of them will say something like "studies have proven that this vaccine induces an immune response. No study has proven that there is a decrease in disease incidence with this vaccine." Again, that is a lawyer-mandated CYA comment. Of course there isn't such a study. You'd have to get a big group of people, randomly give half of them the vaccine and the other half a dummy shot, then (after giving the immune system time to respond) expose them all to the active disease and see which group gets sick more. That violates human research ethics in so many ways. Intentionally give people disease? Google "Tuskeegee Syphilis Study" and read about it.
I get really mad when people go on about how much better immunity is when induced by "a simple childhood illness." Ummm, the point of the immunity is NOT TO GET THE ILLNESS. It isn't always sneeze twice and go on with life. In the interest of full disclosure I will say that I do not now, nor ever have in my career, make ONE SINGLE PENNY from vaccines. But I want these illnesses eliminated. I only see sick kids; I wish my whole specialty would become unnecessary because all kids were healthy.
