The Yellow Fever Vaccine: More Questions Than Answers

In January, 2019, news outlets reported the death of a leading cancer researcher in the UK, who suffered total organ failure not long after receiving a yellow fever (YF) vaccine. Both the UK and the U.S. recommend YF vaccination for anyone nine months of age or older who is planning to travel to a yellow-fever-endemic country in sub-Saharan Africa or South America.
Public health authorities admit that the YF vaccine—an attenuated live-virus vaccine—can, in “rare” cases, “have serious and sometimes fatal side effects” and that the risks are about four times higher in individuals age 60 or older, but many older travelers continue to be given the vaccine anyway. In the fatal January incident, the deceased scientist was 67 years old; after his death, the medical research institution that employed him instructed The Guardian to amend its news account to say that the death occurred “following,” rather than “as a result of,” yellow fever vaccination.
In the early 2000s, news reporters apparently had a bit more leeway to disclose vaccine risks. A 2001 story about YF-vaccine-related deaths in three countries concluded that the fatalities “underscored yet again that there is no such thing as a perfectly safe vaccine.” A recent search of “yellow fever vaccine adverse events” in PubMed (the National Library of Medicine’s free search engine) pulled up 168 search results for studies published over the past couple of decades. Considering that an estimated 99% of vaccine-related adverse events never even get reported, perhaps it is time to reexamine the yellow fever vaccine’s risks.  Read More Here