Justa, for some reason I do not think you know what a vaccine is in a scientific sense...
He's not wrong, but he's not really right either. It is, for example, entirely possible to contract a weakened version of whatever you're being immunized against. But it's just that: a weakened version. Complications that would require medical attention are rare, rare enough that the benefits outweigh the risks.
And yes, it's certainly possible that a mutated strain of something you've been immunized against could come along, but that is absolutely
no good reason to avoid the vaccine in the first place. With the vaccine you are protected against the most common strains of the disease, without it you are protected against
none of them. Just because there might be some mutation that comes along in the future does not warrant not protecting yourself against whatever you can.
And I'm no doctor, but unless he is too I doubt either one of us is qualified to say what a 3 month old's immune system can and can't handle. We've had a lot of experience with vaccines now; if the medical community didn't have a good idea of what was good to do when, I'd be astonished.
And as for the increase in the number of vaccines used these days, that is simply because we've increased the number of things we can vaccinate against. I don't see why this is a bad thing. The reason all these diseases are dead in the first world is
because we vaccinate against them, and that makes it all the more important we continue doing so. It's not like it's impossible for diseases that rarely affect first world nations to re-appear (unless they're the completely eradicated kind), and if no one's been vaccinated against it, there are going to be serious problems.
And no, I don't know why I basically tackled that in reverse order.
And I don't know why all these paragraphs start with "and" either.
Edited by Locke, 26 May 2014 - 08:49 AM.