Austin Van Niel

Advanced Writing
Dr. Suzanne Richard
4/5/17

Do Vaccines Need New Warning Labels?

There are hundreds of ingredients in vaccines including formaldehyde, aluminum

hydroxide, and ammonium sulfate. These do not really sound like ingredients that are going to
help our kids fight disease, they sound like things that may hurt them. However, vaccines have
been around for hundreds of years in their modern form. Edward Jenner is credited as the father
of modern vaccinology after his use of attenuated Cowpox virus (vaccinia) to inoculate a 13 year
old boy from the virus in 1796 and this process is still used in todays vaccines. There are even
documented cases of Buddhist monks exposing themselves to various toxins and illnesses to
confer immunity to them in 17th century China. Fast forward a few hundred years and now
children are given over 20 vaccines before their first birthday. But more and more people are
wondering these days are wondering, Is any of this safe?

Warning labels on vaccines and the information given by their prenatal care providers
only contain the dangers of what could happen if these vaccines are given. From the website of
The Institute of Vaccine Safety which is supported by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health, the current warning labels for the most common vaccines can be found. In every
case there is inoculation site tenderness and possible allergic reactions listed. There is however
no information on what the benefits of the vaccine are or what is being prevented by use of this
vaccine. Parents may not know that polio is a permanently disfiguring disease, or that
something like measles or pertussis can kill their child. All they know is that someone with
medical authority once said that vaccines can cause autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and that is
scarier to them than something that they cannot visualize in their heads because they have no
reference for polio or measles but there are plenty of parents around them who have children
living with ASD.

In a retracted paper published in The Lancet by Andrew Wakefield in 1998, he

contended that there was a link between developmental regression coupled with digestive
disturbances in what were apparently developmentally normal children that got worse as time
went on and they received more vaccinations. Wakefield and his colleagues were later charged
with ethical violations, scientific misconduct as they failed to disclose financial interests, and
fraud as there was proven evidence of data tampering. Before it was retracted in 2010 there
was a sharp decrease in parents who vaccinate their kids and this was due largely to their fear
of their kids developing autism which cased pockets of preventable diseases to spring up. This
still continues even after the research was retracted.

Parents who chose not to vaccinate their kids often wish that they knew the risks of not
vaccinating their kids before they chose not to. They were only hearing what the downsides and
risks of vaccinating their children were only to have them contract a serious illness and die, all
the while exposing other children that they come into contact with these deadly diseases. It was
so long ago that there were measles, mumps, polio, rubella, cholera, meningitis, pertussis, and
chickenpox outbreaks that people have forgotten how dangerous and deadly these diseases
can be. They did not grow up when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president and could see in
mainstream media the effects of what happened before these vaccines were commonplace and
these diseases were eradicated.

There is a growing concern among parents that vaccines still cause what is now
recognized as ASD because they contain aluminum. Initially it was thought to be caused by
thimerosal which was used to prevent bacterial contamination but has since been removed due
to growing concerns. A paper published in Entropy in 2012 by a group from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology describes behaviors as autistic but does not give any information as to
what these behaviors were or what percentage of the subjects were later diagnosed with ASD.
Specifically it states that the aluminum used in vaccines is enough to cause these effects and
that there is no safe level of aluminum because it is a neurotoxin. In response to this, the Food
and Drug Administration released a statement containing the levels of aluminum found in
vaccines and how much aluminum the average infant was exposed to through vaccines.

An infant who receives all of the recommended vaccinations by 6 months will be

exposed to 4.4mg of aluminum. To put this in perspective, 6 months of breastfeeding will contain
7mg, 6 months of formula feeding will contain 38mg, and soy formula feeding will contain
117mg. If these levels of aluminum was an issue, there would be hundreds of millions of more
cases of ASD since nearly every infant is fed through at least one of these methods. The
exposure is so low from vaccines that even if there was to be an effect it would not be the fault
of the vaccines. The Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control both
have stated that aluminum poses an extremely low risk to infants even if we were to quadruple
the vaccines given, especially since only 75% of the aluminum is absorbed. The absorbed
aluminum is then excreted naturally through urine.

There needs to be a new way to give these parents a reference for these deadly
antiquated diseases. They are scared of their child dying from disease but because they can
see more children with ASD, and more every day, than they do children dying of measles or who
have been paralyzed by polio. The risks of not vaccinating your children should also be in this
packet of information given to parents. If we can stop making a generalization that all vaccines
carry the risk of ASD, which has since been proven false and even those that still contest this
because of the aluminum failed to recognize that many other things contain much more
aluminum than vaccines, and instead focus on what these vaccines prevent we can save lives
and prevent childhood trauma associated with prolonged medical treatment.

A simple switch from inclusive to exclusive thinking, that is from thinking that vaccines
can possibly cause these effects to thinking vaccines prevent all of these effects, can change
the way people think about vaccines. This can mean the difference between a parent deciding
that they are not going to vaccinate their children out of fear of what someone falsely said but
they still do not want to risk it, to thinking that there are worse things than having a
developmental disorder. Even though studies of over 14 million children have said that there is
no correlation let alone causation that vaccines cause ASD.

Parents will not listen to science because they are scared of what someone said and
now there will always be that thought in the back of their mind as the nurse goes to give their
child a shot. But all parents need to be knowledgeable that there is something far worse than
what they have a reference for in order to make an informed decision. Andrew Wakefield did
irrevocable damage to science by publishing false information to parents who are scared. We
cannot make this go away overnight but we can certainly give parents both sides. All too often
these mainstream scientific reports of complex scientific data water down the findings or only
report on what the cursory findings of the research were, excluding the limitations, error,
statistical analysis, and discussions. These mainstream reports are what people trust and the
scientific community needs to respond accordingly by showing people what the benefits of
vaccines are. There should be material on what this vaccine prevents and what should be
expected should the recipients contract the illness that this vaccine is designed to inoculate
against. These labels should be in plain language so there can be no question that not receiving
a particular vaccine could result in contracting a deadly disease or have permanent detrimental
effects.

Works Referenced for Further Reading:

Wakefield, A.J. et al. (1998). Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and
pervasive developmental disorder in children. The Lancet. Vol 351. Pages 637-41.
Subsequently retracted in 2010.

Rao, T. S. et al. (2011). The MMR vaccine and autism: Sensation, refutation, retraction,
and fraud. Indian Journal of Psychiatry, 53(2), 9596. http://doi.org/10.4103/0019-
5545.82529

Seneff, S. et al. (2012). Empirical Data Confirm Autism Symptoms Related to Aluminum
and Acetaminophen Exposure. Entropy. 14, 2227-2253. doi:10.3390/e14112227.

Keith. LS. et al. (2002). Aluminum toxicokinetics regarding infant diet and vaccinations.
Vaccine. ;20(Sppl. 3):513-7.

Hill HA. et al. (2015) Vaccination Coverage Among Children Aged 1935 Months.
MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2016;65:10651071. DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6539a4.

Reagan-Steiner S. et al. (2015) National, Regional, State, and Selected Local Area
Vaccination Coverage Among Adolescents Aged 1317 Years. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly
Rep 2016;65:850858. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6533a4

Rice, C. E. et al. (2012). Evaluating Changes in the Prevalence of the Autism Spectrum
Disorders (ASDs). Public Health Reviews, 34(2), 122.