No vaccination is perfectly safe – as with any medicine there are potential serious side effects.

Vaccinations started with inoculation, whereby tissue from the victim of a disease was scraped off and inserted into a cut or scrape on the flesh of a healthy person. Vaccinations via injections did not start until much later. The first vaccination was in 1855 for smallpox, and the vaccination carried the risk of encephalitis, or brain inflammation, leading to permanent brain damage.

In the 1920s the diphtheria vaccine was introduced with the risk of potential nerve damage – coma, decreased level of consciousness, prolonged seizures and Guillain-Barré syndrome. In the 1950s tetanus and polio were introduced, with the risks, respectively, of paresthesia and convulsions, and other progressive neurological disorders again including Guillain-Barré.

At this time, vaccines in the US were neither mandatory nor were they funded by government – it wasn’t until the 1960s that governments started to subsidize local government vaccination programmes, and not until the 1980s that all 50  US states had introduced mandatory vaccines for all children wishing to attend school.

Each additional vaccine brought the potential for nerve damage via the disorders listed above, and this risk increased with each additional vaccine. Vaccine requirements have increased over time and now the current recommended vaccination schedule has over 30 doses of vaccines for fifteen diseases before the age of six, with another set of vaccinations between ages seven to 18, nearly all of them required for school attendance.

Is it any wonder that neurological disorders resulting from nerve damage have reached epidemic proportions?

Also see Michelle's blog post, The Vaccine Epidemic and review of The History of the Peanut Epidemic

Back to top