Life
Here's a fun fact: I'm married to a descendant of Edward Jenner, the British scientist who, in the 1790s, developed the first vaccines in history for smallpox. Jenner's revolutionary idea, based on the knowledge that women who contracted smallpox's relative cowpox while in contact with cows seemed immune to smallpox's ravages, would develop into one of the greatest alleviations of suffering in human history. The practice of vaccination, in which a small quantity of a disease is injected into a person to train their immune system to recognize it and therefore develop immunity, has saved a colossal amount of human lives; the measles vaccine alone, estimates the World Health Organization, has saved 17.1 million lives since 2000.
But arguments against vaccines remain in small pockets of the community, from misconceptions about their effectiveness and side effects to worries about medical self-determination — and if you run into an anti-vaccinator at a party, it can be difficult to get your thoughts together sufficiently to argue against them. That you need to do so is imperative; non-vaccination is incredibly dangerous.
So here's a beginner's guide, with all the stats, reassurance, and argumentative weight to convince anti-vaccine people that theirs is a problematic and misguided choice.
Common Argument #3: They Put Kids At Risk
A common anti-vaxx argument is that vaccines are inherently unsafe. One of the major arguments for this is the fact that, in the U.S., the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has given $3.18 billion in compensation to people bringing forth claims since 1988. Surely this means that there's something inherently wrong?
Not so fast. TIME crunched the numbers, and came up with the startling observation that the number of claimants compared to the number of vaccinations actually given over the time period meant vaccines have less than a million-to-one chance of doing harm. They also pointed out that the compensation is done on a no-fault basis, so the court doesn't require concrete proof that the problem was caused by the vaccine. A minute number of claims (around three per year) are about lifetime injury, and those make up for most of the compensation. They make up around 90 of the 2.5 billion or so vaccinations given in America during the period. The math shows the risk is incredibly miniscule.
It's intuitive that there are some risks to vaccines; after all, it does involve placing a small amount of a problem into the body. However, as histories of vaccination make clear, a lot of very intense work has gone into making sure that they are as close to 100 percent safe as possible, and they've come damn close. Many people experience mild side effects after vaccines as their immune systems kick in (tenderness, a touch of cold); the most severe reactions are usually in people who have an allergy to some component of the vaccine. And our understanding of how allergies interact is always better-safe-than-sorry. For instance, the CDC recommended for a while that people with severe egg allergies be observed for 30 minutes after getting a flu shot, but they've since determined that allergic reactions are unlikely.
Common Argument #4: They Contain Poisons Worse Than Natural Immunity
The idea that "natural immunity" will somehow be a better alternative to vaccinations is a common part of vaxxer arguments; they note that a small dose of measles as a child will develop the immunity in their kids without the necessity of getting "chemicals" via vaccinations. There are a few problems with this. One, it requires that the child actually get ill, and take the significant risks of doing so, which I've talked about above. But two, it fundamentally misconstrues what the "chemicals" in vaccines actually do.
Natural isn't always better. Arsenic is naturally produced, for instance. But the chemicals in vaccines (which have been thoroughly and rigorously tested before being given to the majority of a population, including very young children, because governments have no wish to kill off their citizens) are designed to be low-dose and are only present because of absolute necessity. The preservative thimerosal, for instance, was attacked as potentially problematic because it contains a variety of mercury (less toxic than the kind that made hatters mad), but it's only around to make sure that multiple doses don't go off. It's now been removed from most vaccines or is only present in trace amounts. They did it as a precautionary measure, not because it's been found to be harmful, but because the evidence that it did or did not cause any issues was "inadequate" either way, and it was better scientific practice to pull the preservative and do more tests than leave it in. They issued a final report in 2004 exonerating thimerosal from causing autism.
Common Argument #5: Everybody Should Be Able To Make The Choice For Their Kid
This is the big one for many anti-vaxxers: that compulsory vaccination represents government overreach and that the personal choice of parents is paramount. The problem is that vaccination needs to be done en masse to be fully effective. The phenomenon of "herd immunity" is a key part of vaccination: if you vaccinate the vast majority of a community, they protect people who can't get vaccinated or are more vulnerable, like infants, pregnant women, and people with severely compromised immune systems, like those on chemotherapy. Nineteen out of every 20 people need to be vaccinated for this protection to work. If you don't vaccinate your kid, you're placing children with cancer, for instance, in severe danger.
Targeted vaccination is also important: for particular illnesses, certain groups are more liable to get and spread them than others, and so need to be a focus of vaccination. "Selective vaccination of groups that are important in transmission," vaccine developer Dr. Stanley Plotkin explains in his guide to herd immunity, "can slow transmission in general populations or reduce incidence among population segments that may be at risk of severe consequences of infection." One of the big targeted populations? Small kids who might get flu.
Vaccination is not an opt-in, opt-out thing, unfortunately. If you live in the middle of nowhere and will never have exposure to other humans, ever, feel free not to vaccinate. Vaccination mandated by the government is fundamentally designed for the greatest possible protection; it's rather like FDA rules on, say, food producers. They can't just let food companies opt out of listing their ingredients or obeying rules on use-by-dates and food storage. Contamination can spread, and the laws exist to make sure everybody remains safe. Your child, like every other child and adult, has a fundamental right to grow up healthy. That is a right worth protecting with a jab in the arm.