Doctors debunk 13 vaccine myths

• Doctors debunk 13 of the most common myths about vaccines and vaccinations.
• They explain how vaccines work, the vaccination schedule for kids, and the vaccine testing process.
• They also debunk the myth that vaccines give you the disease it's meant to prevent, and talk about the origin of the false notion that vaccines cause autism.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Maria Elena Bottazzi: "The best place to get vaccines is in the buttocks." Well, as much as I love the buttocks, I have to say that primarily vaccines can also be received in your arms.

Nipunie Rajapakse: Myth seven, "It is not necessary to vaccinate babies." It is definitely necessary to vaccinate babies.

Bottazzi: "Vaccines are not tested enough." This is definitely a myth, because vaccines are tested all the time.

Rajapakse: Hi, my name is Dr. Nipunie Rajapakse. I'm a pediatric infectious disease specialist.

Bottazzi: I am Maria Elena Bottazzi, and I am a microbiologist, virologist, and vaccinologist.

Rajapakse: Today, we'll be debunking some common vaccine myths. Myth one, "If the disease has been mostly eliminated in my country, I don't need a vaccination." So, this is a common question that we get. If we all lived in a bubble and there was no movement of people, this myth might hold true. But we know because of travel and movement of people around the world, even if a vaccine-preventable disease has been eradicated from a certain area, it can easily be reintroduced, and you can come in contact with that disease. The only infection that has been eradicated from the entire world is smallpox, and that was largely done through vaccination. We've come close to eradicating other vaccine-preventable diseases, like polio, but unfortunately we have not quite made it there yet, and many of these infections are still present in different parts of the world.

Bottazzi: Myth No. 2, "There's no use getting a vaccine that's less than 100% effective." That is absolutely not true, because any vaccine brings some level of protection by having your body practice while it's waiting to get exposed with the real pathogen. So even if you get exposed and you are partially protected, that will mean that you will be getting a less severe disease, you probably will not need to get hospitalized, and the body can recover faster.

Rajapakse: Most of the childhood vaccines are somewhere between 85, 95% effective, depending on the exact vaccine and the person that you're giving it to. So, how effective a vaccine is depends on both the vaccination itself as well as your own immune system response to it. Myth No. 3, "Vaccines give you the disease that they are meant to prevent." So, this is definitely a myth.

Bottazzi: There's confusion, because you may be getting some symptoms when you get the vaccines. For example, fever, or, you know, a sore at the site of infection. And it gives the perception that you're getting a disease, but vaccines are not going to give you the disease.

Rajapakse: The whole reason for vaccination is to expose your immune system to kind of trick it into thinking it has been exposed to the infection, so that it has a chance to practice and develop protection.

Bottazzi: Myth four, "Vaccines can cause autism." There's been a lot of evidence that vaccines do not cause autism.

Rajapakse: Where the question came about mostly relates to a study that was published in the late 1990s by an investigator who eventually was found to be publishing fraudulent information, essentially made-up data, and had his license revoked and is no longer allowed to practice medicine. And so that made its way into the media and has caused a lot of damage. We've had a lot of kids who have not received their measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines and have developed measles and ended up with lifelong sequelae from that. And so people have looked at this, they've studied it time and time again, multiple different studies looking at hundreds of thousands of children in different countries, and no link has been found between vaccines and autism. So, myth No. 5, "It's not safe to get more than one vaccine at a time." This is false. Our immune systems are very powerful systems within our body, and they're designed to react and respond to many different pathogens, infections simultaneously, and the number of antigens we say that you are exposed to in a vaccine is pretty minuscule compared to the number of things that you come across in your daily life. And so it is definitely safe to get more than one vaccine at a time.

Bottazzi: Myth six, "The best place to get vaccines is in the buttocks." Most of the times, they're being given in your arms, because you can also look at a lot of the site of injection and how it reacts. And it's because it's probably closer, also, to arriving to, indeed, the most important immune cells and where the immune cells locate, so that then the response can become systemic.

Rajapakse: For most children, or younger children, sometimes the vaccine can be given into the thigh as well. So the thigh and the arms are the most common places that vaccines are given now. Myth seven, "It is not necessary to vaccinate babies." Infants and young children are really part of our population that stands to benefit the most from getting their routine vaccines. The way that our vaccine schedule is developed in the United States is to provide kids, especially, with immunity to infections at the times where they're most vulnerable or at highest risk of developing severe disease if they get the infection. And so that's why, in the first year of life, we provide many vaccines to kids, because that is the age group where they're at the highest risk if they were to become ill with one of these pathogens. There are many conditions, for example, whooping cough, that we know children under six months of age are at the highest risk of needing to be hospitalized or dying if they get the infection. And therefore, it is definitely necessary to vaccinate babies, and it provides them with protection against many serious diseases.

Bottazzi: Myth No. 8, "Vaccines are not tested enough." This is definitely a myth, because vaccines are tested all the time.

Rajapakse: Yes, I completely agree. Vaccines are amongst the most studied things that we use in medicine, and they're evaluated all the way from the lab until after they're deployed and used in the general population.

Bottazzi: So, vaccines get tested when we're evaluating them in preclinical settings, in the laboratory. They are very much evaluated when we're doing experimental trials: phase 1 trials, phase 2 trials, large phase 3 trials. And there's also testing even after their approval.

Rajapakse: Myth No. 9, "The effectiveness of vaccinations has never been proven." Vaccines have been, in some situations, effective enough that they have eradicated disease from the planet, and smallpox is the example there, or have allowed us to become very close to eradicating diseases, such as polio. These vaccine-preventable diseases are becoming less common as we maintain high levels of vaccination in the general population.

Bottazzi: When the vaccines are approved and they start being deployed at large scales, more information is gathered to determine the effectiveness of the vaccine. So, effectiveness is a result of showing that they work in large, large numbers of populations. Myth 10, "Vaccines can contain harmful ingredients." So, this is definitely a myth. So, I work specifically in vaccine production in our laboratories. We have to assure that the ingredients are disclosed, and we have to assure that the ingredients are part of what is called acceptable ingredients that have proven that they are not going to be harmful, especially to human populations.

Rajapakse: So, many additional ingredients aside from the vaccine components themselves that you might see listed in a vaccine are there to make the vaccine safer, in many cases, or to increase their effectiveness. And so you might see something like aluminum added to boost the immune system response. And it's important to realize how tiny the amounts of these things in the vaccine are and that a child who is breastfed or fed formula ingests much more aluminum in their diet than they would ever get through any vaccination. Myth 11 is, "Better hygiene practices mean you don't need vaccines."

Bottazzi: It's not gonna protect you 100%, but especially pathogens that are transmitted through mosquitoes or any other type of vectors, you know, hygiene alone is probably not going to prevent you being exposed to potential very, very bad pathogens. Myth 12, "Doctors only recommend vaccines because that's how they make money." Vaccine companies, in fact, do not even make a lot of money, because now this is practically a common good. So this is not one of the essential medicines that really come with any kind of economic attachment. Vaccines are a public-health intervention.

Rajapakse: They have actually done some studies to look at it, and in many situations, once you factor in all of the things that are needed to deliver a vaccine safely to someone, so, storage, purchase of the vaccine itself, personnel for your clinic, when they've looked at pediatricians who do a lot of vaccination in our country, in many cases they have actually found that they lose money by giving vaccines. And so it's quite the opposite of this, but we all do it and we recommend it because we know that it is one of the best things we can do to keep our kids safe and healthy. So, our last myth is, "Vaccines have microchips that track you."

Bottazzi: Vaccines do not have microchips. As you know, we have to, one, disclose all the components of the vaccine formulation. And right now there are no devices that are approved to be combined with the vaccine formulation.

Rajapakse: Where people may get confused is sometimes the packaging of a vaccine or a vaccine vial could have information on it that they use to track who got the vaccine, so that if there's any issues they know which patient to contact, or so that that information can go directly into your medical record, but there are no microchips within the vaccines themselves or that are being injected into any patients for tracking.

Bottazzi: As a vaccine developer, I would add that also if you would like to understand how vaccines have been evaluated during the experimental trials, is that you could go into the Food and Drug Administration site, and that, paired with information, of course, that is provided to you by your primary-care physician, it's probably the best location where you can look for veridic and trustworthy information.