Local erythemas
Fever
Irritability
Tiredness
General rashes (acute urticaria)
Conjunctivitis
Arthropathies
Peripheral tremor
Cough and/or coryza
Post-vaccinal meningitis (aseptic meningitis)
Guillain-Barre syndrome
Brachial neuritis
Anaphylactic shock
Multiple sclerosis
Chronic arthritis

Lasting damages, such as the consequences of a post-vaccinal meningitis, and life threatening diseases, such as anaphylactic shock, are most feared. The short-lasting, smaller side effects are usually interpreted as the normal reaction of the immune system to the attenuated disease (i.e., the vaccine) and are therefore regarded as harmless. According to available statistical data, the "side effects" of the real diseases are much more frequent than those of the vaccination. Therefore the following conclusion is commonly drawn: Vaccinations prevent more damage than they cause and are therefore of considerable benefit to society.

Side Effects of Vaccinations

Legally, only symptoms which appear within a well defined time (normally a few days or weeks) after the vaccination, and thereby suggest a causal link to it, are considered to be side effects of the vaccination (VISE). Symptoms that develop slowly or those that develop only after considerable time has passed are difficult to link to the vaccination, because the patient is exposed to many other environmental influences during this period. Because data on these delayed effects are difficult or impossible to treat in a statistically meaningful way, these side effects are not recognized as caused by the vaccination: Up to the year 1991 "only" 1870 patients in Germany filed claims based on VISE according to the BseuchG [federal law concerning epidemic diseases] [21]. According to Buchwald [31], through 1992, 3407 cases of VISE have been legally confirmed in Germany. This corresponds to a prevalence of 4.3 per 100,000 (persons with the disease at a certain time) at an incidence of 0.21 per 100,000 (new persons acquiring the disease each year). For the population of Germany this translates into about 170 confirmed VISE per year. The number of filed claims is, of course, many times higher.

Gathering data on long-term VISE requires very expensive and laborious observations over long time periods. Those would only be useful, however, if comparable groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated subjects were available for long-term study. Many ethical and forensic problems arise at this point. Furthermore, it is difficult to find a sufficient number of unvaccinated people. There are no comparative long-term studies on vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.

An important question in the assessment of how frequently VISE occur has to do with how much attention is given to the observation of VISE and how frequently the connection between VISE and vaccination is made. The editorial of the J. Med. Microbiol. [11] comments: "The rate of post-vaccinal meningitis varies between studies and may be dependent on how hard the investigators try to uncover such cases." This comment was made with respect to a study on the MMR vaccination in the United Kingdom. In this study the authors show that the risk of aseptic meningitis is not, as previously thought, between 0.4 and 10 per million, but rather between 1 and 11 per ten thousand [16]. During mass-vaccinations this leads to a shockingly high number of complications [32], since in this case everybody, without exception, comes into contact with the (attenuated) virus; not just a part of the population, as with the naturally occurring disease.

Several years elapsed between the 1988 introduction of the MMR vaccination in the UK with the so-called Urabe-mumps strain (sold under the brand names Pluserix and Rimparix in Germany before they were removed from the market in 1992) until the realization of the high risk involved, when strain was replaced by the Jeryl Lynn strain in 1992. It is generally assumed that this strain does not, or does less frequently, lead to aseptic meningitis, even though cases of meningitis have already been reported for this particular vaccine [26].

Development of Vaccines

The fact that there even exist different strains of the vaccine has to do with the way they are produced. All vaccines in use today contain live, attenuated viruses (as do measles, polio, rubella, influenza, yellow-fever, varicella).

The "transmutation" (attenuation) of a virulent wild strain into a vaccine is today still an empirical process. The virus is subjected to several passages in various cell cultures under non-optimal growth conditions. Through this process, the virus changes its specific properties, but remains a "live" virus. The mechanism involved in this attenuation is not known in any detail. Following attenuation, a few safety investigations are made and the reactivity and efficacy is tested on laboratory animals and volunteers.

This process has not changed in essence since the early experiments with vaccines during Pasteur's time. Pasteur, for example, developed a rabies vaccine [52] by cultivating the virus in rabbits and "attenuating" it through variable-length exposures to air. It was this method that made Pasteur famous as well as infamous, since many people died from rabies caused by the vaccination itself [57].

In the case of cowpox vaccination, which has been abandoned in our latitudes, the origin of the virus contained in the vaccine is not even known. The original vaccine from cowpox used to be transferred from child to child because there was no way of conserving it. Re-cultivation on cows was only successfully accomplished after several decades. In the meantime, attenuation of the vaccine had been achieved in thousands of human bodies -- a very dangerous process indeed, because not only the cowpox virus was transmitted, so also were all other infectious diseases of the person. "This vaccine is molecular-biologically different from the variola virus as well as the cowpox virus." [58]

Nowadays there are different vaccines, according to manufacturing processes, put on the market by various companies, all with differing properties. However, the molecular basis of the active principle is in most cases still unknown. The natural virus is indistinguishable from the attenuated virus by serological methods. The Urabe-mumps virus and the Jeryl-mumps virus are identical on that basis. Only through the modern technique of gene sequencing has it recently become possible to identify several differences between the vaccines. It is, however, still unknown why one strain is more reactive than the other. Also unknown is how these genetic differences come about during the process of attenuation. After all, the injection of a live, attenuated virus is a process involving many unknowns and immeasurables, which are taken on faith due to the obvious success and favorable risk/benefit ratio in fighting the so-called mass epidemics.

Reaction of the Immune System

It is important to realize that the reaction of the immune system to the injected vaccine is only known partially:

It has been observed frequently that antibody levels do not go hand in hand with immunity to the disease . . . The investigation of the second branch of immunity, the cell mitigated immune response, has been technically much more difficult and turned out to be very complex . . . There exists now a large number of experimental data and insights into the different mechanisms of the cell mitigated immune response including their interactions among each other and with the humoral immune system. Despite that fact, we have only fragmentary knowledge about the concrete role of the cell mitigated immune response to an infection by isolated pathogens in the human body. [58, p270].

These statements are very important:

1. The potentially disease-provoking properties of a vaccine are unknown (the structure of the genome is not known).

2. The reaction of the immune system to the injected vaccine is not known in any detail.

3. The interaction of the altered state of the immune system (after the vaccination) with other variables is unknown.

We don't know which long-term consequences may arise from this, because studies focus predominantly on short-term reactions to the vaccination. There are, however, indications of long-term side effects of the immunization.