Some legislators and religious leaders question the safety of vaccines, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. In New Jersey, an effort in December to pass a bill that would end religious exemptions and require students enrolled in any school or college, public or private, in the state to be vaccinated failed to get enough votes; supporters say they will try again in the next few days to pass the bill.

Often, skeptics do not appreciate the vastly greater dangers of the diseases that vaccines prevent.

We accumulated and evaluated data from leading medical journals, the most recent edition of the reference work Plotkin’s Vaccines and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to compare the risks of becoming ill with measles, flu or cervical cancer to the minute chances of experiencing side effects from their corresponding vaccines.

Here is what your odds look like.

Measles Risks: Pneumonia, Infection, Death

The United States eliminated measles in 2000, but in 2019 the number of cases increased greatly, largely because of public resistance to receiving the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine.

When the disease was imported from abroad and spread across the country, unvaccinated children (and some adults) got sick. Outbreaks were concentrated in New York, Michigan, Oregon, Texas, California, Illinois, Georgia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Washington. In some or all of these communities there was a rise in vaccine exemptions.