How Can You Know if Vaccines Are Safe⁠↗

Although we will never have perfect data to rule out any possible link, it seems very important to ask, What is the evidence on the other side? What is the reason to think there is an association? The answer is: nothing.

It is unethical to deny individuals in a trial access to a proven treatment. Consider a trial of a new type of chemotherapy for breast cancer. When running this trial, the new therapy is compared with the existing therapy. It is not compared to doing nothing. The reason for this is obvious: doing nothing would kill the patients, and it would not be ethical to enroll someone in a trial and then randomize them into a group where you know they are more likely to die.

The reason to use regulation rather than liability is efficiency. This is a topic discussed in the economics of regulation. As noted in this paper: [W]hen litigation is expensive, unpredictable, or biased, the efficiency case for regulation opens up. Put simply: If vaccines were subject to liability rather than regulation, any claims about vaccine injury, however frivolous, would be litigated in court.

Virtually all of the ideas for more vaccine testing would result in fewer vaccines. Testing every new vaccine variant with an unvaccinated placebo group would put children at risk and cause more illness and, possibly, death. Introducing liability rather than regulatory approval for vaccines would likely result in most childhood vaccines being pulled off the market. This would also lead to illness and death.