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Health officials are constantly reminding concerned parents that vaccines are safe, and their children won’t suffer any serious side effects. Without these reassurances, the mass immunisation programmes would falter, just as they did when the MMR-autism debate was at its height.
Sadly, health officials play fast and loose with the truth, and spin takes over from their social responsibility to tell parents the facts. Those facts are simple enough: no vaccine is totally safe, and, in the vast majority of cases, children will suffer some distressing, although transient, side effect.
Study after study has amplified this fact, which health officials are so keen to hide from parents. But still it sneaks out. A new study of 372 children in the USA who have been given the DtaP (diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough) vaccine discovered that two-thirds suffered an erythematous reaction, and swelling around the vaccinated area.
The symptoms seem benign enough: it’s a reddening of the skin, often caused by inflammation or infection, but it is an indicator of something potentially more serious. These reactions seem to occur when the child has received the fourth or fifth dose of the vaccine, suggesting an inability to cope with the vaccine’s toxicity.
In addition, around half of the children said their limbs were aching and hurting after the vaccination.
The purpose of the study was not to reveal these facts – this was merely an aside – but to examine ways medicine could treat these infections and inflammations. In each case, doctors were prescribing paracetamol and ibuprofen, and found they were no more effective than a placebo. So not only do vaccines cause health problems in most children, there’s nothing medicine can do about it when it happens.