Why do some folks think that vaccine injuries are so common?

Oh, the usual suspects…
Bobby Kennedy’s Vaccine Injury Debate
Hopefully everyone sees what Bobby Kennedy is doing here.
He is mixing up a lot of different things, hoping you won’t notice and that you will walk away scared to vaccinate and protect your kids.
First things first.
Does the CDC say that 1 in 1,000,000 may be injured by shots?
Actually, no.
That sounds like the rate for severe vaccine injuries, like anaphylaxis and death.
What Bobby Kennedy is talking about though, that Federal Study, is a report, Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (ESP:VAERS), that was conducted at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc.
“Preliminary data were collected from June 2006 through October 2009 on 715,000 patients, and 1.4 million doses (of 45 different vaccines) were given to 376,452 individuals. Of these doses, 35,570 possible reactions (2.6 percent of vaccinations) were identified.”
Electronic Support for Public Health–Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (ESP:VAERS)
The study identified all possible reactions, including minor reactions, like pain and fever, and wasn’t looking at just vaccine injuries, unless that is what you consider to be a vaccine injury. And since the study was looking at VAERS and possible reactions, they were not even necessarily causally related to the vaccines that the kids were given.
What else does Bobby Kennedy say?
“Slide 3 is a table from HHS’s 2016 Neiss-Cades survey published in JAMA reporting an astonishing 19.5% of children under five who are admitted to emergency rooms for drug reactions are suffering vaccine injuries.”
Bobby Kennedy
What kind of vaccine injuries?
They are vaccination reactions – any adverse effect from a vaccine. They could be fever, hives, or a febrile seizure – we don’t know. Importantly, only a very small percentage of those kids who went to the ER were hospitalized.
Lastly, Bobby Kennedy wonders how a pediatrician might claim to have never seen a vaccine injury.
It’s easy to understand his confusion.

Most people reserve the term vaccine injury for the more severe reactions covered under the Vaccine Injury Table, like anaphylaxis, VAPP, thrombocytopenic purpura, and intussusception.
And they use the term side effects for the more temporary reactions that are thought to be caused by a vaccine.

That’s very unlike those folks who consider anything and everything that happens after a child is vaccinated, even if it is many months later, to be a vaccine injury, including things like ADHD, diabetes, and autism, etc.
More on Vaccine Injuries
- Is Ocular Palsy a Vaccine Injury?
- Is a Crooked Face a Sign of a Vaccine Injury?
- Can Vaccines Cause Arthritis?
- How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Hurts Autistic Families
- But If It Wasn’t the Vaccines…
- Show Me the Vaccine Insert!
- About Those Anti-Vaccine Signs Some Folks Are Making
- More Questions to Help You Become a Vaccine Skeptic
- Study – US Emergency Department Visits for Outpatient Adverse Drug Events, 2013-2014
- CDC – Possible Side-effects from Vaccines
- Comparison Of The Effects Of Diseases And The Side Effects Of Vaccines
- Adverse Effects of Vaccines Evidence and Causality
- On “Vaccine Injury”: Real, but Exceedingly Rare
- Vaccine Injury Epidemic (VIE) Event: Antivaxers will march on Washington again