Institute for Environmental Sciences, University of Koblenz-Landau, Landau, Germany.
Front Immunol. 2021 Jun 10;12:663280. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2021.663280. eCollection 2021.
Although vaccines have already saved and will continue to save millions of lives, they are under attack. Vaccine safety is the main target of criticism. The rapid distribution of false information, or even conspiracy theories on the internet has tremendously favored vaccine hesitancy. The World Health Organization (WHO) named vaccine hesitancy one of the top ten threats to global health in 2019. Parents and patients have several concerns about vaccine safety, of which the ubiquitous anxieties include inactivating agents, adjuvants, preservatives, or new technologies such as genetic vaccines. In general, increasing doubts concerning side effects have been observed, which may lead to an increasing mistrust of scientific results and thus, the scientific method. Hence, this review targets five topics concerning vaccines and reviews current scientific publications in order to summarize the available information refuting conspiracy theories and myths about vaccination. The topics have been selected based on the author's personal perception of the most frequently occurring safety controversies: the inactivation agent formaldehyde, the adjuvant aluminum, the preservative mercury, the mistakenly-drawn correlation between vaccines and autism and genetic vaccines. The scientific literature shows that vaccine safety is constantly studied. Furthermore, the literature does not support the allegations that vaccines may cause a serious threat to general human life. The author suggests that more researchers explaining their research ideas, methods and results publicly could strengthen the general confidence in science. In general, vaccines present one of the safest and most cost-effective medications and none of the targeted topics raised serious health concerns.
尽管疫苗已经挽救了、并将继续挽救数百万人的生命,但它们却遭到了攻击。疫苗安全性是批评的主要目标。互联网上虚假信息的迅速传播,甚至是阴谋论,极大地助长了疫苗犹豫。世界卫生组织(WHO)将疫苗犹豫列为 2019 年全球十大健康威胁之一。家长和患者对疫苗安全性有几个担忧,其中普遍存在的焦虑包括灭活剂、佐剂、防腐剂或新型技术如基因疫苗。总的来说,人们对副作用的疑虑不断增加,这可能导致对科学结果的信任度降低,从而对科学方法产生怀疑。因此,本文针对与疫苗相关的五个主题进行综述,回顾了当前的科学出版物,以总结有关疫苗接种的阴谋论和神话的可用信息。选择这些主题是基于作者对最常出现的安全性争议的个人看法:灭活剂甲醛、佐剂铝、防腐剂汞、疫苗与自闭症之间错误的关联以及基因疫苗。科学文献表明,疫苗安全性一直在不断研究。此外,这些文献并不支持疫苗可能对人类总体生命构成严重威胁的说法。作者建议,更多的研究人员公开解释他们的研究思路、方法和结果,可以增强公众对科学的信心。总的来说,疫苗是最安全、最具成本效益的药物之一,没有一个目标主题引起严重的健康问题。