Reply #72: Mercury is chosen by the anti-vaccine people because it's pretty hard to argue with...

[Recursion]

...but the issue goes a lot deeper than that. A lot of the same people who talk loudest about mercury also wouldn't vaccinate if the vaccines were free of it.

My own position is that the importance of vaccines is often overstated (compared to sanitation and other public health issues) but vaccines in themselves are not doing much harm, and doing a good deal of good. But I don't like how they get put forward as the one and only answer to communicable diseases, when in fact they're just one "leg of the stool", as it were; but they're the only leg that makes people a profit, so they get all the attention. Putting a good sewer system in Lagos would save more lives than giving everybody an MMR, for instance, but how do you make a billion dollars doing that?

And I'll reiterate, if I had to choose between giving up modern sanitation and giving up modern vaccination, I'd keep sanitation in a heartbeat. This is kind of a non-issue for the developed world, but the developing world faces that choice quite literally: spend money on medicines, or on sewage and water treatment systems.