Vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe,” but that doesn’t mean they are dangerous

The Logic of Science

I have increasingly seen anti-vaccers citing the Supreme Court ruling that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe,” as proof that vaccines are dangerous and should be avoided. In reality, however, the term “unavoidably unsafe” is just legal jargon that does not mean what anti-vaccers think it means. So let’s talk about what it actually means

The first thing to realize is that this is a legal term, not a scientific one. This is not a term that scientists use when doing risk assessments or testing the safety of drugs. So right off the bat, we have a huge problem because this argument is conflating legal terms with scientific ones (I’ll return to that at the end). So what does this legal term actually mean?

Basically, it means that there is nothing that can be done to make the product safer without compromising the function of the product. The term comes from the…

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