> She either get as answer 'do them all as there's absolutely no risk' or 'vaccines are bad'."

She's supposed to receive a handout from the CDC describing the known risks. That required by law, I believe. These handouts say, over and over, that there's always a risk, that there are common mild side-effects (redness or soreness where the shot was injected, for example), and that the severe side effects are extremely rare, as in larger than 1:1,000,000. It's hard even to know if some of the side effects are due to the vaccine or not.

The handout she gets is supposed to tell her where to report severe side effects, and tell her about the fund that's set up to pay money to those who have severe side effects.

But the side-effects are so rare that it falls into the background noise. It's hard to even think about odds this low, which is the reasoning behind the "micromort"; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort . A risk of 1:1,000,000 is about the same as traveling 6 minutes by canoe, or 250 miles by car.

This is so low that most people say "no risk" rather than enumerate all the low-probability ways you could die.

> the cdc used children as guinea pigs for a new vaccine

I don't know how the paper defines "guinea pig." The answer is both 'yes' and 'no', depending on how you want to interpret it. If "guinea pig" means "children used as a subject for a medical test", then the answer is certainly "yes."

There's a point between "we think this is a possible vaccine" and "this vaccine is effective." At some point you need to inoculate children and see if the vaccine works. In this respect, those children are indeed guinea pigs.

But if by "guinea pig" you mean there's no knowledge of what the risks are, or even that the test is going on, then there's a long story.

Earlier in our history we would test physically and mentally disabled children in institutions (see Koprowski's work on the polio vaccine), or people in jails (see Southam's experiments with HeLa cells), or simply not tell them what was going on (see the Tuskegee syphilis experiment).

This is unethical, though it took a long time to establish and require those ethical standards. Human testing requires oversight by an institutional review board, and informed consent from the test subjects.

There's all sort of problems related to what "informed" means. Obviously, children cannot grant informed consent, so their parents are used as proxies to make the decision. Even then, it's hard to know if the parents have all the information they need to make a decision.

It gets even worse with overseas testing. There have been many attempts at coming up with a malaria vaccine. One such is RTS,S (or Mosquirix). You can read about the ethics behind the test http://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa1208394/suppl_fi... . There are several pages detailing what they did to maintain good ethics:

- follow international and local standards for testing

- get independent local doctors to provide oversight

- have community meetings, and meetings with local leaders

- discuss the goals and methods with the parents, including the use of an impartial witness for illiterate parents

and more. For example, we know that bed nets are effective at reducing malaria, so all of the children who volunteered for the trial - even if they weren't accepted - got insecticide treated bednets.

So yes, those 6537 infants are guinea pigs. We don't know of a better way to find out if a candidate vaccine works.