It's no great secret that the anti-vaccine movement is rife with scientific inaccuracies and logical fallacies, but a few of their claims are so extraordinarily erroneous and demonstrably false that I have difficulty calling them anything other lies. There are several of these falsehoods that I considered writing about, such as the blatantly false claim that vaccines contain mercury and aborted fetal cells, but I ultimately decided to focus on just two dangerous and pervasive assertions: the claim that the safety of vaccines hasn't been tested, and the claim that measles isn't a dangerous disease.

The safety of vaccines hasn't been tested

This claim is something of a rallying cry for the anti-vaccine movement, and I repeatedly see it on anti-vaccer blogs and memes. If it was true, it would indeed be a serious problem, but it is demonstrably false. There are literally hundreds of papers on the safety of vaccines, and they are easy to find. Get on Google Scholar or PubMed and search for papers on the safety of vaccines. In mere seconds, you will be rewarded with numerous safety trials. That is why I consider this claim to be a lie. It's not a debatable claim about the toxicity of a chemical, experimental results, etc. Rather, it is a simple factual statement. Either these papers exist or they don't, and they clearly and undeniably exist. Therefore, anyone who tells you that the safety of vaccines hasn't been tested is either lying or willfully ignorant. Either way, they clearly aren't a trustworthy source of information.

Now, some people will object that I am being too general. They'll say that although a few safety trials have been done, these studies are limited and don't address all possibilities. This claim is usually followed by an example of a specific type of study which they believe has not been conducted. I clearly can't make a blanket statement that none of these claims are true, but the vast majority aren't, and it takes only a few seconds to discredit them. So, again, the people making these claims are either dishonest or willfully ignorant.

Here are just a few examples of studies that supposedly don't exist.

Claim: There are no double blind, placebo controlled studies on the safety of vaccines

Reality: Yes there are. I entered, "vaccine safety double blind placebo controlled" on Goggle Scholar and got 62,000 results. Granted, not all of those are going to actually be relevant, but many of them are. For example, Zhu et al. 2010 and Cutts et al. 2005 were among the first three results. Again, the claim that the anti-vaccers are making is absurdly easy to test. It takes mere seconds. So the fact that they don't bother to test it should be extremely disturbing to people.

Claim: "There are no studies comparing the health of the vaccinated and unvaccinated"

Reality: Yes there are.

Claim: There are no studies on the effects of the large number of antigens in vaccines/the effects of multiple vaccines

Reality: Yes there are.

I could keep going, but hopefully by now you get the point: scientists have very carefully studied the safety of vaccines from multiple angles and the result has consistently been that they are safe. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is either deceptive or simply doesn't know what they are talking about. Either way, you should not be getting medical advice from this person.

Measles isn't a dangerous disease

This claim has been around for a long time, but it gained recently popularity after the Disneyland outbreak. In response to the accusations that they were responsible for the spread of the disease, many anti-vaccers argued that measles is a "harmless childhood disease" and isn't really that serious. I have seen this claim on innumerable anti-vax blogs and memes, and there is even a truly horrifying children's book based around this notion. The reality is completely different. During the supposedly harmless Disneyland outbreak, for example, 20% of patients were hospitalized. Anything that requires hospitalization deserves to be called "serious." You don't take people to the hospital for harmless childhood diseases. You take them to the hospital for serious medical conditions that require expert intervention. I have never once seen a parent stand beside their child's hospital bed, shrug their shoulders and say, "it's just a normal childhood illness." Further, just because these children recovered doesn't mean that the illness wasn't serious. Many people recover from heart attacks, but that doesn't make cardiac arrest a "minor illness."

Now, let's look at some general data rather than data from a specific case. On average, 1 out of every 20 people who get measles will develop pneumonia, which can be deadly in young children. In fact, 1 out of every 1,000 measles infected children will die as a result. Something that kills children clearly should be taken seriously and is not harmless. Further, even if