September 2012: Age and the Risk of Death

What is the right age to get a vaccine? The CDC has a schedule of vaccinations that it recommends for ages 0-6 and ages 7-18. Are these ages appropriate?

One way to explore this is to look at the ages of people who report vaccination reactions to VAERS. It should be expected that the age groups with the most number of vaccine reactions will coincide with the ages that the CDC recommends for scheduled vaccinations. The graph should show spikes at the ages when most vaccines are given.

And in fact, that is what we see. The graph below is a custom age graph with finer age groupings in the early years (this requires Expert Mode to produce). What we see is an expected graph, with spikes in vaccine reactions in the second year of life as well as in the teenage years.

But now let's change the graph so that it shows only those VAERS reports where the patient died. If you believe that death is merely an extreme reaction, and that some people react that way, then you would think that the graph of people who died would look the same, except with smaller numbers. But interestingly, the graph has a completely different shape: This is frightening. Infants in their first three months of life are dying at a far greater rate than any other age group, and infants in the first six months of life seem to be at the greatest risk of dying after a vaccination. This is completely out-of-line with the rate of other vaccine reactions.

Are we vaccinating our children too early? Many people think so (see here or here). Might it be reasonable to delay some of these vaccines until we are a bit older and better able to cope with them?

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