by Sarah Parrish

Created on: March 24, 2009   Last Updated: March 26, 2009

Vaccinations help the immune system. There's very little quesiton about that. They don't hinder the immune system or slow development. They're designed to provide antigens to which the immune system can provide a more robust response, so if anything, a vaccine will provide an immune response where there wouldn't have been one before. Some people claim that getting a vaccination makes them sick. There's no doubt in my mind that this is often the case. That's the point of vaccinating. You want to make yourself just a little bit sick (sometimes what constitues "a little bit" is misjudged) so that your body can recognize a virus and form an immune defense against it.

I've heard some claims that vaccines are the reason there are more cases of autism now than there were a hundred years ago. There's no evidence to support vaccines as the cause of autism as correlation doesn't show causation. There might be more registered cases of autism today and there might be more people partaking of vaccines. These might even both be due to increases in medical technology we didn't have in the past including how we have better selection criteria for determining what constitutes one of the various forms of autism and we have a greater production of vaccines, but in no way do the two phenomena directly relate.

The reason there's a debate regarding whether or not to vaccinate your children isn't surrounding the issue of whether or not vaccines help the individual. The reason the benefits of vaccination are convoluted have more to do with how viruses mutate and whether or not vaccinations help society at large. Ironically, while a vaccination helps an individual, it hinders the rest of society by strengthening the ability of mutated strains of the virus and even selecting these more robust and often more dangerous forms.

Vaccinations came about when people were suffering from deadly viruses and doctors realized that after you've been exposed to a virus (if you survive it) you have an immunity to it. So doesn't it make sense to expose the body to a very weak form or very little of the virus so the body can learn what the virus looks like and can build antibodies against it to fend off future viral infections but to only expose the body to a weak enough form such that it's easy to conquer? Sure, that makes a lot of sense, and for a long time it was successful - and on an individual level, it still is.

The way this works is when the body is infected with a virus, part of the immune response

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>