• All health care professionals must practice in accord with the state laws governing their health care discipline(s). Be familiar with your state practice act, and if you have questions or need clarification, contact your state board. Contact information for chiropractic state boards is available online at http://www.fclb.org.
   
• In such circumstance when the health care provider opts to provide information or counsel to their patients about vaccination, they have a professional responsibility to provide their patients with current, accurate, unbiased (balanced) information based on sound scientific evidence, to support their patient's ability to make a truly informed choice.
   
• The Internet has created an "information explosion". Patients may express difficulty in sorting through and "making sense of" the myriad of complex and seemingly contradictory information about vaccination that is readily accessible on the web. The following links provide useful guides that can help health care consumers determine whether various Internet-based information comes from a credible, authoritative source. http://www.hhs.gov/nvpo/tips.htm
  http://hitiweb.mitretek.org/docs/policy.html#eval
   

• Each vaccine needs to be considered separately and uniquely, in terms of its potential benefits and risks and the relevant scientific evidence base. Oversimplified generalizations about "all vaccines" or "vaccination in general" are neither accurate nor helpful.
   
  Two reports summarizing the available scientific evidence are now available online. The first report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) reviews the possibility of cumulative effects from receiving multiple vaccinations, titled "Immunization Safety Review: Multiple Immunizations and Immune Dysfunction". Link to IOM report.  The second report from the U.S. Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ) reviews the evidence associated with neurologic disorders attributed to vaccine administration, titled "Assessment: Neurologic risk of immunization. Report of the Therapeutics and Technology Assessment Subcommittee of the American Academy of Neurology". Link to AHRQ report.
   

• FAQ/Fact Sheets about vaccination are also available online, and are one option used by many health care consumers who seek reliable, authoritative, and "user-friendly" summaries of scientific evidence-based information. Link to more information. 
    
• Most patients may not readily understand that "scientific evidence" is a very different concept from "legal evidence", and that each carries a very different standard for weighing the benefits vs. risks of vaccination or whether vaccination causes negative outcomes. We have briefly described elsewhere in this website the different types of scientific evidence for establishing causation (Authoritative Sources) and we have cited in our online bibliography the scientific evidence on vaccination (Bibliography). The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a national vaccine safety surveillance program that collects and analyzes information from reports of adverse events following immunization, which contributes to building the "scientific evidence" about vaccination. VAERS encourages the reporting of any clinically significant adverse event that occurs after the administration of any vaccine licensed in the United States. Patients and health care providers should report clinically significant post-vaccination adverse events even if they are unsure whether a vaccine caused the event. 
  VAERS website: VAERS - The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System

  The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) to compensate individuals whose injuries may have been caused by vaccines recommended by the CDC for routine use. The standard of legal evidence for compensation under VICP allows a statutory "presumption of causation" which is a very different standard than that of scientific evidence of causation. The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) is separate from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Reporting an event to VAERS does not file a claim for compensation to the VICP. 
  VICP website:  VaccineSafety/VICP

[ Top of Page ] [ Up ] [ Home ]