Vaccines are safe and widely effective

The argument

Vaccines should be mandatory because they have been proven to be safe and effective. A mandate is a serious imposition, so an argument for one has to begin by establishing that what is being required is thoroughly understood rather than merely recommended. The US Department of Health and Human Services maintains that vaccines are among the safest medical products available to the public. Part of the reason lies in who receives them. Because vaccines are given to millions of healthy people, including children, they are held to very high safety and efficacy standards, higher than those applied to treatments given to people who are already ill: a person who is well has no illness to weigh against a risk, so the tolerance for risk is correspondingly small. The process that enforces those standards runs both before and after approval. Any licensed vaccine is rigorously tested across multiple phases of trials before it is approved for use and it is continuously monitored. The phased structure means a candidate must clear each stage before being given to a larger population, and the monitoring that follows licensure is what allows effects too rare to appear in a trial to be identified once a vaccine is in general use. Testing and evaluation by institutions like the Food and Drug Administration and recommendations from institutions like the CDC ensure that only clinically tested and safe vaccines are made available for widespread public use. Vaccines should and can be mandated because the public can be assured that their vaccinations are safe and functional, which is precisely the assurance a requirement of this kind depends upon.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Vaccines should not be mandatory because even those that are deemed “safe” can do harm. For instance, vaccines contain harmful ingredients. Aluminum is used in some vaccines, and excess aluminum in human bodies can cause neurological harm. Glutaraldehyde, a compound used to disinfect medical and dental equipment, is used in some DTaP vaccinations and exposure can cause asthma and other respiratory issues. Some flu vaccines contain cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTMB), a compound used as an antiseptic, which can be a skin, eye, and respiratory irritant. The list goes on and on. Vaccines can be deemed safe for distribution and use even when they are made up of ingredients that can do minor to severe damage to damage to an individual's health.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise rests the safety case on institutional assertion rather than on the evidence behind it. The stronger ground is the trial and surveillance record that leads those bodies to their conclusion; stated as an appeal to what an agency maintains, the premise is weakest against precisely the audience whose objection is distrust of the agency. [Rejecting P2] Testing and monitoring establish that risks are identified and rare, not that they are absent — regulators publish known adverse events, and licences have been restricted or withdrawn when post-marketing surveillance found problems, which is the system working as described. The larger gap is that neither premise reaches the conclusion: safety and effectiveness describe what a vaccine does, whereas a mandate raises separate questions of compulsion, exemption and enforcement, which is where the opposing position actually presses.