From birth, we are taught that vaccines were one of the most remarkable discoveries in history, and were so safe and effective that many now unimaginable plagues vanished with few to no side effects occurring in the process. In truth, give or take, every part of that mythology is false, and remarkably similar vaccine disasters occur every few decades.

Much of this results from the fact that it is very difficult to produce safe vaccines due to both their mode of action and the methods used in their production. As such, the best "solution" which could be found to this problem was to insist in lockstep that vaccines were safe and erase any memory that vaccine disasters had in fact occurred, thereby making it possible to gaslight anyone who was severely injured by a vaccine and claim their injury was just anecdotal or a product of anti-vaccine hysteria.

For example, previously, I discussed how vaccines cause autism, and focused on a central argument used to debunk the link between the two—that the only reason people believe vaccines cause autism is because a disgraced British doctor published a fraudulent 1998 study claiming they did and then made everyone start hallucinating that vaccine injuries were occurring.

This mythology however, ignores that brain injuries were a longstanding problem of vaccination. For example, a 1982 NBC news program revealed that many parents were having children develop "post-pertussis encephalopathy" after taking the DPT vaccine, that most doctors refused to report this.

To quote that program:

Medical knowledge about severe reactions to the whooping cough vaccine goes back to the early 1930s. Report after report has been published in medical journals since then. In 1948, two American doctors reported on case histories of many children who had been brain damaged or died from DPT vaccines in Boston. The following year, another doctor surveyed pediatricians across the country and found still more. Those studies have been forgotten.

Likewise, in 1985, one of the most popular talk shows in America (the Donahue show) hosted a segment where doctors from both sides (and neurologically injured members of the audience) debated the risks and benefits of vaccination and the ethics of mandates. To the best of my knowledge, this was the last time an open debate of vaccination aired on mainstream television.