Those Immunisation Blues

LabourList are trying to have an intelligent conversation about immunisation. Unfortunately, like pretty much everything that happens with LabourList, it goes a bit wrong. Or, to put it another way, it goes very badly wrong. Mainly because the author of the post appears to be terrified of immunisations having read the list of ingredients in an injection, and has decided that they are a bad thing:

If I offered you a cocktail which included in its ingredients formaldehyde, aluminum phosphate, ammonium sulfate, washed sheep red blood cells, embryonic fluid from chickens and thimerosal, what would be your initial reaction? Would you gladly accept this concoction of animal byproducts, heavy metals and chemicals without question?

No, I probably wouldn't. But then again, I probably wouldn't willingly ingest something containing Magnesium and Acid - yet I do, when I have a vitamin pill each morning. Likewise, I wash it down with a bit of Phosphoric Acid - in my diet coke. See the vitamin pill does me good (and the coke makes it easier to swallow): it is good for me. Just as reading the details of an immunisation wouldn't make me relish  and want it, the contents do me a lot of good.

The rest of the article argues that there are bad things in immunisations, and that there are too many vaccines injected on one go. The author wants more of a debate about immunisations, and potentially wants individual immunisations for his kids. Whether or not that the latter point is practicable is something I just don't know about, but the tone of this article is the sort of scare-mongering that you might associate more with The Daily Mail than with a supposedly progressive website. 

As a Libertarian, I don't believe anyone should be forced to have an immunisation*, just as I don't believe that Tony Blair - or anyone else - should be forced to reveal whether they or any member of their families have had vaccines. However I don't see why anyone wouldn't want to have their kids immunised. There is no real evidence that immunisations - despite their scary ingredients - do any harm. And it is far better than your kid having measles. Or mumps. Or even TB. 

Have a debate on the issue until you are blue in the face - but the bottom line is immunisation has saved millions of lives and eradicated some terrible diseases. And unfortunately the counter-argument needs to be something more than the vaguely luddite pronouncements and scaremongering of the LabourList article. 

*Although I'm not sure what the public health implications would be of giving people the choice...