Should We Ban Some Vaccines?

I was in my Psych Assessments class today when my professor told us that she had decided to not give her children MM&R or Hep B vaccines due to her fear of the vaccines' mercury content . Her decision has caused her a lot of problems with school officials but she has stuck with it. Her stubbornness is at least partially because that her personal experience in the human services has shown her that there is some truth to the suspicions that these vaccines are harmful.

While assessing people, my professor has discovered that many people say that their learning disability/ health problems etc. started soon after they were vaccinated. In particular, she said that she has noticed ADHD evolving after people get vaccines. I knew about the potential of vaccines to induce late onset autism in some cases involving babies, but it turns out that at no matter what age you get these vaccines, if you are already biologically predisposed to being vulnerable, your nervous system and attention span can be affected in addition to some other less common side effects. Especially the MMR vaccine (Measles Mumps & Rubella) because it supposedly overwhelms the immune system.

I still need to find more information on this subject, although there is very little definitive research. Hmm. . . Wikipedia attempts to review the two-hundred-year controversy concerning vaccines but this only confused me more in addition to making me somewhat worried because the website also connected the MMR vaccine with gastrointestinal symptoms such as Crohn's disease and other digestive disorders.

I believe that I read that they finally removed the mercury from vaccines as of 2002, but that there still are potentially other harmful preservatives in the vaccines that can cause damage, but I can't remember where I read this.

A classmate of mine from Vermont shared that in her state there is the option to either get all the vaccines or none of the vaccines for your child but you can't pick and chose which ones you want. I would imagine that it must be VERY hard to go through the Massachusetts' school system without all your vaccinations. They have become a part of life. It will be hard to change the pre-school vaccination ritual. I wonder how concrete the evidence must be and how many definitive cases there must be to prevent vaccines from being given each year? Do their merits outweigh their potential harmful effects?

Goodnight!