Typically, parents will avoid and refuse specific vaccines for two reasons. Either they fear serious vaccine reactions because of a vaccine’s history, or the disease causes so little concern that the vaccine does not seem necessary to them. Other diseases represent a greater threat, and parents may feel more secure giving the vaccine than risking the disease in their child. When parents make an informed choice, they will be taking responsibility for their own child’s health care, doing their best to ensure that child’s safety and future. An informed choice requires information.

Adverse events resulting from vaccines may be due to the bacterial toxin or virus component of the vaccine, or to the chemicals used in the preparation and preserving of the solution. These chemicals include mercury, formaldehyde, aluminum, and a variety of other known toxic materials.

Vaccine reactions are notoriously under-reported. Many factors contribute to the reluctance of physicians to report a vaccine reaction, not the least of which is outright denial. Self-protection and self-reassurance are other psychological motives. Physicians do not want to admit that they have caused a problem. They like to think that their interventions are helpful, not harmful. They have also been assured and instructed by the vaccine industry that certain reactions that parents regularly observe, such as brain damage and death, cannot be attributed to the vaccines. A whole range of bizarre and pathological behaviors that infants display after they receive vaccines must have another cause, they argue. It would have occurred anyway, regardless of the shot.

Short-term reactions
Immediate or short-term reactions following vaccine administration have been consistently reported in the medical literature since vaccines have been in common use. Reports of these reactions have caused rebellion within the populations of various countries, and governments have responsed in various ways.

In 1975, Japanese parents refused to give their children the pertussis vaccine after widespread publication of two deaths following vaccination. The Japanese government changed its policy in response to this protest, and delayed the recommended age for vaccination until two years. During the late nineteenth century, individuals in the United States protested that mandatory smallpox vaccination infringed upon their constitutional right of personal liberty. The issue was brought to trial and, in 1905, the Supreme Court upheld the rule that state police power included the need to protect its citizens from diseases. All cases since then have resulted in the same conclusion based on this precedent. When European countries began suspecting that the pertussis vaccine was dangerous, they eliminated it from the recommended schedule of childhood vaccinations. When parents in the United States have refused to administer this vaccine to their children, however, their children have been taken into protective custody by the state.