Superficially speaking, the statement (Vaccine-Preventable Diseases Occur More Often in Vaccinated People Than in Unvaccinated People) is true. However, it is important to understand why.
Medical doctors Paul Offit and Louis Bell explain:
Let’s say that among 100 young adults living in a college dormitory, 95 were vaccinated against measles and 5 were not.
An outbreak of measles then strikes.
Six of the 95 vaccinated people get measles, as do 4 of the 5 unvaccinated ones.
This would seem to indicate that vaccinated people get measles more commonly than unvaccinated people.
But let’s look more critically. The attack rate for measles in the unvaccinated group was 80 percent (4 of 5), whereas the attack rate for vaccinated people was only 6 percent (6 of 95).
So people were much less likely to get measles if they received the measles vaccine.
A study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that unvaccinated people were thirty-five times as likely to get measles as vaccinated people.
You can read more about vaccine myths in my book God’s Design for the Highly Healthy Child.
Here are other blogs in this series you might find useful: