Should we give our baby this vaccine?

For children, there are 2 groups of vaccines:

• The "compulsory vaccines" - This is the basic vaccination programme for every child in Malaysia. Therefore, we can get it free from Klinik Kesihatan (government clinic). Nevertheless, we can also get it from private clinics or hospitals. For the latter, we need to pay.
• The "extra vaccines" -  These are the vaccines not available in the Klinik Kesihatan, and therefore we cannot get them free. However, we can get it from most children clinics and private hospital.

For "compulsory vaccines", we should have no questions whether to give to our children, as this is consistent with the basic healthcare standard of Malaysia. The choice is either to get them from the government clinics or the private clinics/ hospitals.
For "extra vaccines", we should decide whether they are necessary for our babies. To answer this question, I suggest you to consider the following factors:

1. Safety - the vaccines should only have minimal side effects and statistically negligible major side effects. For example, pneumococcal conjugate vaccine had been extensively investigated for its safety profile before and after launching in the market (refer here). The long history of use with no reported major side effects should be an added advantage. After all, we do not want our children to be guinea pigs, right?
2. Effectiveness - the vaccines should be effective and protect the majority of vaccinated people.  The chickenpox vaccine is about 70% to 85% effective at preventing mild infection, and more than 95% effective in preventing moderate to severe forms of the infection (refer here). Some vaccinated children do still get chickenpox but they have very mild disease (typically lesss than 50 spots).
3. Preventing common disease - There is no point to prevent a disease that is not common in Malaysia because the risk of infection is very, very low. For example, we do not need to prevent againt yellow fever (don't worry if you never hear of this term, because it is not reported in Malaysia.) It is a different story if you are travelling to Africa or South America.
4. Preventing serious disease - there are thousands of diseases and it is impossible to prevent each and eveyone of them. However, we should try to prevent the serious diseases. Vaccines are considered to be the most effective way of disease prevention, after clean water! Our government had in the past provide hepatitis B vaccine, and now going to give free HPV vaccines to the 13 years old girls (read here). 
5. Cost - I think we have to be practical in life. Everyone of us has limited budget and resources. We do not need to give all the available vaccines in the world to our baby. We should instead think of the potential benefit of the vaccines. For example, pneumococcal vaccines can cause more serious disease than influenza in general. So, a parent should choose the former over the latter if he dicides to give either one of the vaccines to the baby.

I hope the above principles can help some parents to make an informed choice of their children vaccineation programme.