Linux Mint downloads (briefly) compromised

Of course there are risks associated with vaccination. No reasonable person disputes that. There are risks associated with everything. Crossing the street is risky. However, as you correctly state, the risks associated with vaccination are very, very low and the benefits are huge, which makes vaccination worth doing on the whole.

Even if you are right and adverse effects from vaccinations are underreported by, say, a factor of 10 (i.e., only 1 out of 10 cases is actually reported and 9 cases are suppressed through negligence or malice), you're still statistically way more likely to become severely disabled or even die from some disease like measles than to become severely disabled or die from the vaccination. For measles, the fatality rate in Western countries is something like 0.3%, or 3 cases out of 1000, while the fatality rate from measles vaccinations is considerably less than 3 cases out of 1,000,000. That's more than three orders of magnitude right there, so even if – hypothetically – only 1 out of 100 adverse reactions was being reported and the other 99 suppressed, measles vaccination would still end up being a good idea by a comfortable margin. Widespread vaccination programmes have brought world-wide measles fatalities down from an estimated 2.6 million deaths per year in 1980 to around 100,000 in 2015.

Measles are very, very contagious. You can of course rely on “herd immunity” (i.e., the fact that almost everyone around you is vaccinated) and hope that you'll get away with not being vaccinated yourself because the measles virus will never get near you, but if enough people around you think the same thing, herd immunity will break down, measles outbreaks can happen – thanks to anti-vaxers this occurs a lot more often than it used to –, and eventually people will die. Herd immunity is important because there are people who cannot be vaccinated even if they wanted to, and it is up to the rest of us to protect them.

It is necessary to balance the risk of serious vaccine side effects (which is very, very low – 1 in hundreds of thousands of vaccinations or less, and that's counting all sorts of things that don't have a clear causal relationship to the actual vaccination) against the risk incurred by not vaccinating, which is way higher, especially in communities where there is insufficient “herd immunity” because there are too many anti-vaxers. The problem is that by not having yourself or your kids vaccinated, you're endangering people who cannot be vaccinated at all because they're too young or immunocompromised and have to rely on herd immunity to ensure that infectious diseases (like measles or polio) don't come near them.

We see this in real life with the recent measles outbreaks in the US or Germany. Here in Germany, these usually take place in or around Steiner schools, where parents tend to be against vaccination. Anti-vaxers often claim measles are just a harmless childhood disease, but in fact measles (or complications from measles) can severely disable or kill you and that happens far more often than any sort of serious vaccine side effect. More than 300 people worldwide die of measles per day (115000 deaths in 2014, according to the WHO), usually in places where there are no vaccination programs. Even in Germany, at least one child died recently during a measles outbreak, and it is overwhelmingly likely that this could have been prevented by vaccination.

There is a certain risk to vaccination but the risk/benefit ratio is so clearly in favour of this very important public-health measure that scaring people away from it is disingenuous. In fact, people who think vaccination is too risky should never use a car, bus, or bicycle, because the risk of getting seriously injured or killed in a traffic accident is orders of magnitude greater, even if you believe that serious vaccine side effects are consistently underreported.