ARE VACCINES SAFE ?

The news today includes a story about the safety of vaccines which, it's reported, an increasing number of people are questioning. Apparently the general uptake of vaccines is falling and in France is now only at around 70% of what is expected. The blame for this reluctance of people to trust vaccination has been placed on misinformation spread on the internet, which may well be the case, but is there more to it ?

On one level the simple answer to the question of safety is obvious - of course vaccines are safe and they've saved the lives of countless millions of people since the discovery of their potential more than 200 years ago. Smallpox has been eradicated while childhood killers such as measles, polio, diphtheria and whooping cough are now little more than inconveniences in much of the world. Vaccines have been, and are being developed to combat more and more diseases with malaria being targeted as well as some cancers. How can anyone think this is bad ?

However, some have claimed that certain vaccines have dangerous side effects, such as causing brain damage and mental health; such claims have generally been refuted by those who promote vaccination as being essential and it also has to be acknowledged that the evidence for such effects is sparse. What concerns me much more is the way in which vaccination has taken a similar path to that of the use of antibiotics.

The viruses which are targeted by vaccines are tiny cells which can invade other cells and cause them to malfunction. Our bodies' immune systems can often deal with these in the same way that they deal with invasion by bacteria, but not always; this is where vaccines come in, training our systems before they suffer all out attacks and making us far more resistant. However, some viruses are able to undergo small mutations which prevent our bodies from reacting effectively, the prime examples being the viruses which cause colds and influenza; regular tiny changes in these viruses mean that effective and long-lasting vaccines are difficult to develop.

Where this leads is to a simple question. If bacteria have been able to adapt to antibiotics to such an extent that antibiotic resistance is now a major problem, might not viruses eventually do something similar ? Might vaccines eventually cause some viruses to mutate, become resistant and even more dangerous ? After all, nature is all about adaptation, mutation and survival.

While some of the diseases which were prevalent and deadly a century and more ago are now hardly considered, others have arisen. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) appeared, as if from nowhere but quite possibly from the mutation of some other virus in the 1940s or 1950s; the Ebola disease currently ravaging parts of Africa is another which seems to have been unknown as recently as half a century ago. The avian influenza virus - H5N1 - which has given rise to serious epidemics, is believed to have mutated from birds and become potentially very dangerous to humans within the last 20 or 30 years only. The simple fact is that viruses, just like all other living species, mutate and adapt to their surroundings. Which brings me back to the safety of vaccines. 

For now, vaccines are the best answer we have to combatting a host of dangerous and deadly viral diseases; in doing this, they are as safe as anything else that we do. There may be rare side effects which may cause isolated problems but, on the whole, wherever vaccination is available and recommended, it should be used. However, what the future holds may be a different matter. In combatting bacteria, we have developed antibiotics to which some bacteria have become resistant, to such an extent that we now have no effective means of fighting them. As resistance has appeared, new drugs have been developed, often with considerable toxicity in themselves, until we have run out of options. If the same thing was to happen with viruses and vaccines, where would that leave us ?

I don't say that this will happen, only that it might; it is a possibility. If it does happen, where will that leave humanity in 30, 50 or 100 years from now ? Vaccines are undoubtedly safe and highly effective today, but will these same vaccines still be safe and effective years in the future ?  Are we actually just initiating another biological timebomb with which future generations will have to deal ?