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Vaccines Are Tested Extensively For Safety

Vaccines are one of the most extensively tested medical products used in the United States today, undergoing more rigorous safety testing﻿﻿ that many medications and far more than nutritional supplements.﻿﻿

Before a vaccine ever hits pharmacy shelves, they are tested for safety in thousands of individuals and over several years. In order to be approved for use in the United States and elsewhere, vaccine manufacturers first have to prove that side effects are minimal and the benefits are worth any risks posed by the vaccines.

Once the vaccines are approved by the Food and Drug Administration or other countries’ governing bodies, researchers continue to study the vaccines to ensure they are safe and effective for as long as they are in use. If at any point the risks of the vaccine start to outweigh the benefits, health officials sound the alarm and the vaccine is pulled.﻿﻿

That’s what happened with the polio vaccine. When an oral version of the vaccine was first introduced back in the 1960s, the virus was rampant in the United States. Kids were being paralyzed, and iron lungs were commonplace. The vaccine was made using live (but severely weakened) polio virus, which made it highly effective at eliminating polio all over the world. But that effectiveness carried some risks, as a very small number of people would get a form of polio from the vaccine itself.

By the mid-1990s, polio cases had plummeted, and the only cases of polio seen in the country were a direct result of the vaccine. At that point, the risks were greater than the benefits, and the vaccine was replaced with a safer (though slightly less effective) inactivated vaccine.﻿﻿

Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated Studies

Large-scale, randomized control studies—where a large intervention (ex. vaccinated) group is directly compared to a large control (ex. unvaccinated) group—are something of a gold standard for science. Health is complicated, and a lot of things can influence outcomes. Being able to control one of those factors helps eliminate some of the uncertainty about what might be contributing to a given outcome (ex. autism).

When it comes to vaccines, however, these kinds of studies aren’t always ethical. Randomly and deliberately leaving some individuals—especially children—vulnerable to a disease when there is a safe and effective vaccine available goes against many of the moral and ethical codes guiding modern science. No institutional review board would approve such a study, and it’s extremely unlikely to be published in a reputable journal. That’s why many vaccine-related studies don’t use placebos in their control group. Instead, they use already existing vaccines (the status quo) and account for the different factors using statistical formulas.