What if "vaccination" is a non-starter?

Analysis of an ideal data set implies that may be the case.

When I was growing up everyone around me accepted the widely stated assertion that vaccines are THE solution to keeping everyone safe from horrific potential consequences of notorious infectious diseases such as polio. I never questioned this during my youth and dutifully received my scheduled vaccines. It wasn’t until I was married and preparing to start a family that I felt the need to question the popular narrative around vaccines. My wife had made me aware of additives used in the vaccines at that time, such as mercury and aluminum (these are referred to as “adjuvants” and are included to generate a greater immune response in the recipient), and how some doctors and scientists had expressed concerns about their possible harms. That compelled me to start doing some digging to try and quantify the risk-benefit ratio of childhood vaccines.

The short version of the story is, while there was data available on the approximate risk of serious disease (from infection by the pathogens for which the childhood vaccines are given), data on potential harms from the vaccines themselves was difficult to find. Without that input to the calculation, and with the risk of infection resulting in serious disease being very low, we elected to stay on the sidelines (regardless of assertions about effectiveness of the vaccines in preventing disease). As a result, I’ve continued to educate myself on the topic which has ultimately led to my personal assessment that the popular vaccine narrative is based upon an overly simplified and inaccurate characterization of this medical intervention.

The following post by Toby Rogers about Dr. Paul Aaby’s research on the subject sums things up quite well.

Why I'm an abolitionist

Ultimately the key findings of Dr. Aaby’s research were:

• Live attenuated vaccines result in more benefit than harm but deattenuate over time causing outbreaks of the disease they are intended to prevent.

• Fragment type vaccines result in more harms than benefits.

Based on these findings, it stands to reason that if we peel away the layers of the long standing vaccine narrative we may find, at its core, the inconvenient truth that the very notion of vaccination as a way to achieve longer term public health net benefits is actually a non-starter. If that is indeed the case, perhaps focusing on ways to maintain optimal immune function and determine treatments for those who experience severe disease would be a better approach.

What do you think?