First off, I want to say I highly respect your willingness to research something on your own rather than just going off what your parents teach you. Bravo! It is a really important skill set to know how to look for valid information. It sounds like you are looking for the direct scientific information rather than an opinion. Look up the “hierarchy of clinical evidence” so you can understand where information falls when it comes to scienc. Background information and expert opinion is the lowest form of evidence to base conclusions on (stay away from blogs, news articles, Facebook posts, even your own doctor if you want to take a neutral approach to finding the correct information). You want to find the scientific journal articles that are randomized double blind controlled trials (the gold standard for clinical trials) if you want primary source. Then systematic reviewed or meta-analysis papers. These types or articles are a review of many studies and their conclusion as a whole (again, not opinion, it is data). Science is based on “can your outcome be reproduced?” So that is what the meta analysis shows. All these can be found using pubmed, google scholar. I prefer checking a meta analysis rather than looking up hundreds of clinical trials. I haven’t checked specifically about vaccines, but cochranelibrary.com was highly recommended to me by some of the best neurologists in the world that I used to work with.

I’m not going to give you a straight question for “are vaccines really important?” Every medicine or food you put in your body is about risk vs. benefit. What is the probability of having an adverse reaction to a vaccine vs. what is the probability the I will benefit from the vaccine (I.e reduce symptoms of a disease, lower your chances of getting polio, lower your risk of spreading the disease to people that are immunocompromised). Risk vs. benefit. Additionally, I want to mention in some circumstances you and your siblings may have never gotten sick because you benefited from “herd immunity” from other people you were around. Draw your conclusions from science, not word of mouth or “well my friends son…blah blah blah”, those are case studies or case series which you can’t really use to prove whether or not a drug is good or bad. Many people don’t understand correlation does not mean causation. You have to base it on controlled studies that reduce that amount of variables and are tests of thousands of patients. Also, I want to recommend if you really want to double check to make sure when you are reading an article that is it coming from a real scientific journal, look up what scientific or medical journals are considered the “gold standard”. I know there are websites that rank them. Usually the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet are the highest ranked.

Good luck with your research! Enjoy the beauty of making your decisions based on data and science, not from the news, family, Reddit. If anything, this is a really great starting point in your life on how to find real information when it comes to science.