The Mad Virologist : April 2016

There have been a couple of requests for all my vaccine infographics to be collated together, so I have put this post together to do that. I am also including a brief explanation of why I have put the risk analysis infographics together the way I have.

Several people have asked if I can put the relative risks of the adverse events from each vaccine/disease together on the basis of what the odds are for this to happen right now. Unfortunately, this is a difficult task and not entirely realistic. In order to do this, I would need to know the percent of the population that is vaccinated, the range of antibody levels they have (called titers), what the genetic diversity of the pathogen is and if there is any potential to escape the immune system (like the influenza viruses do from time to time), how much of the pathogen is circulating, if conditions are conducive to disease spread or not, and probably more factors I've missed. Since these can vary from area to area and change over time, this would be incredibly difficult to calculate. Furthermore, if I was able to figure this out, I'd be publishing in a top medical journal and booking a plane trip to Sweden for an awards ceremony rather than posting it on facebook. So to make this easy and transferable, these infographics are generated on the assumption that you get the disease or you get the vaccination. Those risk factors have been well characterized and the rates are supported by many decades of work.

With that, here are the vaccine risk versus disease risk infographics:

Measles vs. MMR