The benefits of vaccination

There's a flap going on in the mainstream media currently about the death of a girl, which was allegedly caused by being vaccinated against a virus which causes cervical cancer. Having watched some TV news item about it - and its a rare event for me to watch TV at all these days - one thing which is really obvious is the complete lack of any analysis of the figures or presentation of contextual information. To the naive viewer the take-home message is something like:

"OMG! My child could die after being vaccinated!"

The figures presented were 1 death out of 1.4 million vaccinations (that's 0.00007%), but what they didn't bother to mention was how many of those girls would have subsequently died from this particular form of cancer had they not received the vaccine. I suspect that the percentage would be somewhat higher. The lack of this kind of information, presented on prime time TV in an simple way which most people can understand, means that disquieted parents will turn to Google, where they will quickly encounter the purveyors of half-truths, ignorance and pseudo-science, whose messages are often loud, contain entertaining tales of skullduggery, and of course are utterly untainted by any kind of credible evidence.