I don’t like diseases. When I was a kid back in the 1960s, I suffered through mumps, chicken pox, and red measles (or maybe it was German measles or maybe it was both). When you’re a little kid, it sucks to be sick. I still have a pock mark on my forehead from when I had chicken pox. I got sick and my parents and brothers and sisters drove home without me (at Christmas time) and I had to spend a week at my grandparents’ house. Nanny and Pop made me go to bed early and they made me smear calamine lotion all over my face.
I like math. Big numbers don’t scare me. Millions, billions, trillions – they’re all fine with me. Small numbers are good, too. One hundredth of a percent is a tiny number but not as tiny as one thousandth of a percent. I looked at some of the vaccination numbers, which you’ll find down below.
How Many Severely Bad Vaccination Reactions Are There In A Year?
The short answer is: fewer than 3900.
Since 1990, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has had a program called Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The website is here. Here’s what they say:
VAERS receives around 30,000 reports annually, with 13% classified as serious (e.g., associated with disability, hospitalization, life-threatening illness or death)...
About 85-90% of the reports describe mild adverse events such as fever, local reactions, and episodes of crying or mild irritability. The remaining reports reflect serious adverse events involving life-threatening conditions, hospitalization, permanent disability, or death, which may or may not have been caused by a vaccine.
Note that last emphasis. The adverse reaction may or may not have been caused by a vaccine. If you get a vaccination on Tuesday, then get food poisoning on Wednesday, you might end up on the list of people who got sick after a vaccination. But let’s ignore that possibility of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (which is Latin for "after which therefore because of which").
13% of 30,000. So let’s say 3,900 reports of really bad stuff, even though correlation isn’t causation.
How Many Vaccinations Are There In A Year?
The short answer is: at least 38 million per year (if you only count children up to age 5). But that’s not including vaccinations for teens or adults (flu, hepatitis, HPV, shingles, and so on). The real total would be much, much higher.
I couldn’t find a good answer for the grand total, but I can give you a good estimate of how many vaccinations are given to children before they start school. In the United States,there are...
20,000,000 children under the age of 5 (according to census.gov), which means...
4,000,000 children start kindergarten each year. The CDC says states have laws that require vaccinations before kids start school and 95% of kids really do get their vaccinations, which means...
3,800,000 children have their vaccinations. The CDC has a list of 10 vaccinations that should be given to kids before they start school. A couple of other websites gave higher numbers (up to 36 per child before the age of five), but let’s go with the lower number (10 per child), which means...
38,000,000 vaccinations per year just for kids. Remember this number.
I’ve seen estimates for swine flu vaccine that range from 100,000,000 to 150,000,000 doses available in 2009 (the population of the U.S. is about 300 million, so there will be enough for a third to a half of the population). That would bring the total number of vaccinations to 200 million or so, but let’s just say it’s 38 million.
Calculating The Percentages
We have 3,900 (probably less) severely bad vaccine reactions in 38 million (probably a lot more) vaccinations – approximately 0.01%, which is 1 in 10,000. That’s severely bad reactions up to and including death. That number is based on the children’s vaccinations only. If you include flu and other vaccines, the percentage would be much, much less. Probably an order of magnitude less (it could easily be closer to 1 in 100,000).
In an average year, about 100 million Americans get the flu (about one in three), and 100% of them feel the effects (fever, vomiting, headaches, missing work, not writing blogs). The CDC says 20,000 to 50,000 people die from the flu each year (recently, I’ve heard the number 36,000). Which is 2 to 5 out of 10,000.
So if you get the flu vaccine, you have less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of having a bad reaction (possibly death). If you don’t get the vaccine and catch the flu, you have at least a 2 in 10,000 chance of actually dying. And if you’re infected by the flu, you have a 100% chance of suffering from the flu.
That’s why I’m getting the vaccine. It’s based on the math thing.
There are also tons of statistics about the mortality rates from polio, whooping cough, measles, mumps, diphtheria, and various other diseases that can be prevented with a shot. Mumps can make you go deaf. German measles in a pregnant woman can cause birth defects. Vaccines are a very good thing because they prevent disease. If you have a kid, you don’t want him or her to get polio. Salk and Sabin discovered a good thing.
Why Do People Hate Vaccines?
I suppose a big reason is that injecting a dead/weakened virus into your body is a little bit scary. But people have immune systems that are designed to fight diseases. We need to teach our bodies to fight against bad things. I’ve heard a theory that the reason why little babies eat dirt and put things in their mouth is because it helps them develop immunities.
Left wingers (like me) don’t trust big drug companies. But big Pharma makes profits from new drugs that are still covered by patents. Flu vaccine has been around for years. Anyone can make a flu vaccine. Nobody’s making a big profit from it.
Right wingers and overly religious people don’t trust the government (or scientists, either). That’s fine with me. If wingnuts get sick, maybe they’ll shut the fuck up for a few days as they puke up their guts.
There’s the mercury thing. Nowadays, most vaccines don’t contain thimerosal as a preservative/germ-killer. But even if they do, it’s an incredibly small amount – approximately 25 micrograms. That’s about the same amount of mercury as there is in half a can of tuna. Don’t get me wrong, mercury can cause horrible birth defects (look at this Wikipedia article about Minamata Disease, which is horrifying to think about).
I suppose there’s another reason people are worried about vaccinations. The internet. Someone hears about the conspiracy theories from an email or a website and then does a google search and discovers ten million websites that say vaccinations are bad. So they tell their friends about it.
And then there are people like Bill Maher or Jenny McCarthy or Glenn Beck. Not one of them is a scientist, but if they say something on TV, all of a sudden, people believe them.
So that’s why I’m getting the flu shot. If you’re not getting the flu shot, that’s fine with me. I’m not a zealot. I'm not trying to convert people. If you get the flu shot, you’ll have a very small percentage of having a reaction. If you don’t get the shot, you’ll have a higher percentage of dying. But, hey, it’s your decision.