Yahoo put up a front page story about the very few people who suffer side effects and of course the crazy people took it as evidence that vaccines will kill your kids some of the time. Well, sadly that's true. Vaccines will occasionally cause horrible reactions in some kids that will result in hospitalization, severe and lasting damage, or even death. That's a fact.

What's also a fact is that not getting immunized is far riskier. During a past measles epidemic in California 2,014 infants and preschool-age children were hospitalized and 44 died. During that same time I can't find a single report of a kid dying from a MMR reaction in California. Every year lately just under 400 people report a significant reaction to a vaccine, and every year 4,000,000 people get added to the US population. Those are pretty long odds.

Meanwhile, this year 3 million people will die this year from vaccine preventable diseases, most overseas. If the US wants to be more like the 3rd world, it can. We can go back to 80 years ago when a thousand people a year died of measles and thousands more were blinded or worse. 50 years ago an outbreak of German measles caused 11,000 women to miscarry and killed 2,000 infants, last year 9 cases were reported in the US. We can go back to 15,000 dying a year of diphtheria, instead of the 1 person in the last decade.

The US has 5% of the world's population but less than 1% of the world's vaccine preventable deaths. That can change quickly. Just stop vaccinating for tetanus and maybe we can get our share of the 70,000 people this year who will die from it. Typhoid was a classic, let's let that come back too. It's not just the kids too, in the US 50,000 adults will die of a vaccine preventable disease this year and those numbers will go up if this generation of kids undergo a mass-brainwashing against immunizations.

I like analogies so I came up with this: If you say you don't want to immunize a kid because of the 1 in 10,000 chance of a side effect, versus the far greater risk of catching a preventable disease with worse effects- then that's like saying you refuse to fly over a desert because your plane could crash, so you're going to walk barefoot through it instead. Your may not die in a plane crash, but you're definitely not choosing the safest option.