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matt comments on Rationality Quotes: January 2011 - Less Wrong
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When I looked into the infant Hepatitis B vaccine (late 2009) for a girl in an affluent, physically active household in southern Australia, the benefit looked marginal. There are many environments in which the girl could have lived that would have made vaccination clearly beneficial.
It would be surprising if all publicly available vaccines had "overwhelming" evidence in support of their use. That would seem to imply that our public health system hadn't yet approached diminishing returns in searching for things against which to vaccinate, and that large gains were still to be had by vaccinating against more diseases.
(This is a short note on a complicated topic.)
(Vaccines have clearly done much good. Yay Science.)
What makes you think this (your second sentence) is not the case? Plenty of devastating diseases still cannot be prevented by vaccines; that's why people continue to research and create new ones.
Whether all publicly available vaccines (or, more weakly but more relevantly, all recommended vaccines for a particular individual) are worth getting is a separate question, but the recommendations are evidence-based, and I personally believe they represent a guess as good as I can make.
Which doesn't imply overwhelming evidence, though. Just enough evidence.
Agreed; I probably wouldn't have said "overwhelming evidence". But I do think there are still large gains to be made by vaccinating against more diseases, like, say, strep.
Revelation: The point of diminishing returns we would (in an ideal reach) is where health benefits are proportional to research dollars. Once a vaccine is researched, health benefits should be positive. However, variation, like the variation between regions, means that there are cases where an established vaccine has no benefits.