In April, we heard testimony from three members of a Michigan Air National Guard unit who suffered serious health effects after receiving the anthrax vaccine. We address those questions today.
All vaccines cause reactions.
But in doing so, vaccines also cause in some people varying degrees of negative health consequences, ranging from a sore arm to potentially fatal hypersensitive or allergic reactions. Due to its composition and the number of inoculations required, the anthrax vaccine causes local and systemic reactions at what DoD once called problematic rates. Some reactions may only become apparent as vaccine usage expands from a few hundred people each year to 2.5 million members of the military. To capture the true rate of health effects, and to detect unexpected reaction trends, AVIP surveillance systems must be sensitive and receptive to adverse event reports. Military doctors must be advocates for their patients, not purveyors of program orthodoxy.