How does a genuine scientific debate like this get resolved? The only way forward is to develop a new theory that successfully describes all experiments. In the first few decades of the 20th century, Plank, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, Schrodinger, Dirac, Pauli and many others did just that by developing quantum theory. Quantum theory has been mainstream science for almost a century and is at the heart of every laser and computer chip. Interestingly, quantum theory describes light as both a particle and a wave. More accurately, it describes light as something complex (a quantized probability wavefunction) that acts somewhat like a wave in certain ways and somewhat like a particle in other ways. Modern experiments routinely show that light can act like a wave and like a particle, at the same time.
The point is that genuine debates do exist in science, but they require substantial evidence on both sides, and they end up being resolved through more experiments and better theories. There is no way to resolve the vaccines "debate" because there is no evidence that vaccines are ineffective and harmful to begin with. There is therefore no genuine debate surrounding vaccines. A better description of the status of vaccines would be: A scientific consensus exists that vaccines are safe and effective, which is based on a large body of evidence, while a small vaccine-denialism subculture exists that has a hard time thinking scientifically. For vaccine denialists, an infinite amount of experimental evidence will never change their mind because they are not thinking scientifically to begin with. The existence of a science-denying subculture in educated countries is not unique to vaccines. There exists small pockets of people who believe cell phones cause cancer, the position of distant stars controls their destiny, and magnets have healing properties. But considering the life-saving property of vaccines, vaccine denialism is the most dangerous type of science denialism.
Let us look at some numbers. The rate of U.S. rubella infection in the year that a vaccine was released (1969) was 27 people per 100,000 as reported by the CDC. Within 10 years of distributing and administering the rubella vaccine, the rate had dropped to 2 people per 100,000. The current incidence of rubella in the U.S. is less that 0.1 people per 100,000. The CDC further reports that Polio was contracted at a rate of 10 people per 100,000 in 1955 in the U.S., the year Polio vaccinations began to be distributed. By 1975, the Polio infection rate had dropped to just 0.01 people per 100,000. The measles infection rate went from 400 thousand total cases in the year the vaccine came out (1963) to 20 thousand total cases five years later, and is now at less than 1 thousand cases per year. The mumps infection rate was at 90 people per 100,000 per year when the mumps vaccine was introduced and fell to 1 per 100,000 in 1984. The tetanus infection rate was at 2.9 cases per million people in 1955 and after several decades of vaccinations dropped to less than 0.3 cases per million. Because vaccines have been deployed in every country on the globe, vaccines are one of the largest scientific experiments ever run. After centuries of use by billions of people, the effectiveness of vaccines is one of the most verified science facts of all time. Considering that the effectiveness of vaccines is one of the most experimentally-verified science facts of all time, and that denying the effectiveness of vaccines is so life threatening, vaccine denialism is one of the most irrational beliefs a person can have.
In the 1950's, the smallpox virus was infecting humans globally at a rate of 50 million per year. After an intense global vaccination campaign lead by the World Health Organization that spanned two decades, smallpox was completely eradicated from the planet. The last case of smallpox was contracted in 1977 and there have been no cases since then, thanks to vaccines. Vaccine denialists claim that these drops in infectious disease rates are caused by better hygiene and access to vitamins. But this statement does not match the scientific data. The rates for infectious diseases that have no vaccine, such as Salmonella, are not dropping and in many cases have increased during the last 50 years, despite better hygiene and nutrition. The CDC retorts, "Are we expected to believe that better sanitation caused incidence of each disease to drop, just at the time a vaccine for that disease was introduced?" Such thinking is simply irrational.
Arguing against vaccines is not only unwise and unscientific, it is frankly unethical and deadly. An anti-vaccination campaign conducted in Stockholm in 1873 reduced the portion of the population that was vaccinated against smallpox from 90% to 40%. A smallpox epidemic ensued in Stockholm that did not abate until vaccinations became mandatory. Similar anti-vaccination-induced outbreaks happened in the United Kingdom in the 1970's with pertussis, in Sweden in the 1980's with pertussis, in North Dublin in 2000 with measles, in Nigeria in the 2000's with Polio, and in Indiana in 2005 with measles.
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