Re: xTube?
How can you say that something is 'safe' from causing issues 5-10 years in the future
You can't. Because safe means an acceptable level of risk with all the information currently available. Otherwise there are zero safe drugs in existence. You can't scientifically prove a negative - you can't prove a drug will have zero side-effects across a whole population.
However if you can keep
So to call a drug safe to use for pregnant women you might decide that it's of an equal risk to use as the drug is for everyone else. Or you might assess that it has lower risks than the risks of not using it.
That's the trade-off with vaccines. All drugs have side-effects. So the more people you give them to, the more people are going to suffer those side-effects. And the general medical principal is: "First, do no harm". But you give vaccines to healthy people. So it's a matter of statistics - risk to the general population from the vaccine minus risk of the vaccine. Which you usually won't know until you've given the vaccine to a large number of people. There's an extra factor, which is that vaccines reduce the spread of diseases, and in some cases can almost stop the spread of those diseases by creating herd-immunity. It's called sterilising immunity, and is how we eliminated smallpox. And may well be able to elimiate polio, if we can get the vaccine to the last few places.
Even that has a downside though. Many people think that measles is a safe, boring childhood disease. And so because almost nobody in Western countries had had it for years, they don't know how devastating the complications can be, if you get unlucky. Because my Mum worked in special needs schools, starting in the 80s - I've met quite a lot of children who suffered blindness and/or brain damage from getting measles - from before the days of vaccines. Roald Dahl's son died of measles.
Complications - from the CDC website:
Hospitalization. About 1 in 5 unvaccinated people in the U.S. who get measles is hospitalized.
Pneumonia. As many as 1 out of every 20 children with measles gets pneumonia, the most common cause of death from measles in young children.
Encephalitis. About 1 child out of every 1,000 who get measles will develop encephalitis (swelling of the brain). This can lead to convulsions and leave the child deaf or with intellectual disability.
Death. Nearly 1 to 3 of every 1,000 children who become infected with measles will die from respiratory and neurologic complications.
Complications during pregnancy. If you are pregnant and have not had the MMR vaccine, measles may cause birth prematurely, or have a low-birth-weight baby.
So the death rate is a bit under 1 in 1,000 infections. So if a million kids get it every year, about a thousand of them will die.
Which is why the WHO estimate is that measles killed about 2.6m people a year globally before the vaccine was invented in the 60s and now "only" killed about 107,500 in 2023 - with global vaccination rates a bit over 80%. WHO linky
