Are vaccines deadlier than diseases they prevent?

A social media post quotes the former doctor Paul Thomas and his claim that you are more likely to die from a vaccine than from the disease it prevents.

These numbers are not fair or accurate as written. They compare measles deaths and vaccine deaths in two very different ways. A fair comparison only works when both numbers are measured the same way.

For example, it would not be fair to compare your chance of dying from measles this year in a mostly vaccinated country TO any death reported, even if the vaccine did not cause the death. Those are different kinds of situations and numbers.

Let’s look at measles. The post says the chance of dying from measles is 1 in 106.5 million. That number comes from looking at recent measles deaths compared to the whole U.S. population. But that is misleading because most people in the U.S. are vaccinated, so measles is now rare.

A better question is: Out of the people who get measles, how many die?

Before the MMR vaccine, there were about 3 to 4 million measles cases in the United States each year. About 500 people died each year. That means about 1 in 6,000 people with measles died. Some estimates say the risk may have been even higher.

The number they use to talk about vaccine-related deaths is also not being used correctly.

Many vaccine death numbers come from VAERS. VAERS is a system where people can report health problems that happen after a vaccine. But a report does not prove the vaccine caused the problem.

For example, if someone dies in a car accident after getting a vaccine, that death can be reported to VAERS. But that does not mean the vaccine caused the car accident or the death. So it is not accurate to count every VAERS report as a vaccine death.

Even using the post’s own numbers, measles would still be more dangerous than the vaccine. A risk of 1 in 6,000 is much higher than a risk of 1 in 108,000.

But the most important point is this: the vaccine death number is not a confirmed number. In healthy children, there have been ZERO confirmed deaths caused by the measles vaccine.