>Okay, vaccines can harm people.

Yeah, so can lightning, bathtubs, and aspirin. The risk from vaccines is miniscule, and "vaccine victim" is an appropriate way to castigate people who don't understand statistics. Your kid is at more risk of SIDS than vaccine complications. Or, y'know, a bicycle accident. Pretty much everything is more dangerous than vaccines, from McDonald's to driving to drinking -- even smoking marijuana, for that matter, looking at you Bill Maher.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Vaccination

>So? Vaccine manufacturers are immune from lawsuit.

From the article:

>Subsequently, hundreds of vaccine recipients reported they had developed autoimmune side effects. Supported by some patient advocacy groups, a number of class-action lawsuits were filed against GlaxoSmithKline

In effect, your claim appears to be without basis.

The thing is, a certain proportion of people will develop autoimmune issues randomly at any time. If they've been vaccinated recently, there's a chance they'll blame it on the vaccine, but that does not mean the vaccine caused their autoimmune disorder. That is why science is performed by using randomized controlled trials to study the side-effects of treatments, and these scare tactics are absurd and damaging to society. The actual incidence of problems caused by vaccines is much lower than the incidence of problems incorrectly ascribed to vaccines.

From a later post of yours:

>They can just use the CDC data or the NVIC data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Citation_needed

Vaccines are by and large rigorously tested before entering the marketplace. Here's an example of the tests done on the Lyme disease vaccine:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X00...

>A clinical trial of over 10,000 adults showed [...] Only mild or moderate, transient vaccine-associated adverse events have been reported after immunization.

Is ten thousand people not enough for you? How many would convince you? A hundred thousand? A million? Are you willing to pay for this, or do you think science falls out of the sky?

>I like your links to photos of Polio victims. Thankfully, people back then weren't afraid to notice that the first generation of Polio vaccines actually gave Polio to some who took them. Instead of denying the possibility that their vaccine was imperfect, or telling everyone "our vaccine is good enough!, sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet", they improved/perfected the vaccine. Good for them. Shame on their successors.

Consider the previous statement about failing to comprehend statistics. Consider also that your statement is blatantly false: the oral polio vaccine developed in the 1950s remains in use today, and has successfully contributed to the eradication of polio in most of the world. Unless of course you mean the disastrous 1936 "vaccine" that didn't actually prevent anything and was basically the virus itself, but I'm sure you're not intent on being so... misleading.

The injected polio vaccine, itself still on its first generation, never carried such risks, but it's hard to get people to agree to an injection -- maybe because of vaccine scaremongry? Anywho, statistics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Iatrogenic_.28vac...

>The rate of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis (VAPP) varies by region but is generally about 1 case per 750,000 vaccine recipients.

That means that VAPP is one of the only things that is actually less likely to happen to you than a terrorist attack. The existence of VAPP at all is due to the use of a live attenuated virus vaccine for poliomyelitis, which itself is due to the fact that polio is just a real bastard to culture and the vaccine was developed a long time ago. Vaccine reactivation is fun to worry about because it's scary, but in all conceivable circumstances presents far less risk than the disease itself.

>There is no excuse for this. If we have to suffer the perversion of market forces seen in our vaccine industry, there should be no excuses for companies who don't want to produce an existing product merely because it isn't profitable enough.

I dunno, the existence of people who are willing to spread pseudo-"cautionary tales" based on misrepresented data who can make marketing the vaccine a largely fruitless endeavor seems like it very well might be enough to discourage even a benevolent nonprofit organization. I'm glad we don't have such people around here.

Also: it's a "perversion of market forces" when a product that doesn't sell is withdrawn from the market?

>It's a fact, get over it, now let's see an honest discussion with more facts and less name-calling.

Fact #n+1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy#Impact_...