3 ms·

> say a decade, with the current approach. what could happen a decade after taking a vaccine?

• toast0 5y ago
  Shingles happens decades after getting chickenpox. Conceivably an atennuated (or live) virus immunization could have a similar future issue. Lots of other possibilities of immunization causes a small but unnoticed inury that later on proves to be fatal, but because of the gap between injury and fatality is very hard to track down. My son participated in a 'long term' vaccine trial of a slightly different combination of childhood vaccines (if it had been successful in the US, it would have reduced the number of needles by one, but I don't recall the specifics). But long term means they followed up for one year. It's just not really possible to keep track of participants for very long outside of very small studies. Maybe if one day we have decent medical records, it will be easy to run epidemiological studies and find small effects. But you would need to make the decision on the immunization with the known information; maybe 20-40 years later you might find out that it increased or decreased the likelyhood of some disease in old age.