Am really disgusted by ignorant mommies who listen to lying assholes and who think they are more knowledgeable than 50+ years of science/research and really think it is a good idea that their children suffer all the avoidable versions of ‘whatever ‘creepy crawly crud’.

“Oh look, little Johnny is blind deaf sterile …dead; at least he didn’t have a sore arm from a vaccine.”

When I was a child my mother was religious about making sure my little brother and I were vaccinated with everything age appropriate. Even so, my little brother caught a brutal round of pertussis from someone at school. He was out for two or three months with a cough worse than anything I had heard before, regularly coughing to the point of vomiting.

Don’t put other people at risk just because you don’t want to immunize, that’s fucked up and wrong. Even if they have been vaccinated there is still a chance that a person could contract the diseases they’ve been immunized against.

Even now, when I catch cold, I get echoes of that cough, and people look at me funny.

I also got shingles in medical school. The pain was appalling, like someone putting out a cigarette on my skin. I had mild case. I would have given anything for the chicken pox vaccine to have been current when I was a kid, because maybe if I hadn’t been primarily infected I might not have been able to get shingles.

People putting their kids in line for that (and worse) out of being afraid of the ingredients of vaccines are pure unadulterated morons. The reason we have such an “aggressive” vaccination schedule in the first place is due to the fact that we want to prevent infants from getting the infections that used to kill kids as infants. The reason we have 5-valent vaccines is to cut down the number of needles to poor GP has to poke into the infant.

I hate poking babies! But I hate seeing them get preventable diseases WAY more.

I am really glad to hear that your children are vaccinated. But I want you to keep a few things in mind, first and foremost being that vaccines aren’t absolute protection. The only way that vaccines can work is by the vast majority of a given population being vaccinated. When larger and larger portions of the population are not vaccinated, it leaves room for diseases that have been all but eradicated to come back. This in turn leaves people who didn’t develop antibodies, people who only developed a small percentage fo the antibodies needed to fight off disease and those who could not be safely vaccinated in danger.

There are, per the subject of this post, a great many medically fragile children out there. Kids for whom diseases like the mumps, pertussis and many other infections are a death sentence. The way that we protect these kids is through herd immunity. Again, the more people who choose not to vaccinate, the more than immunity breaks down.

And there are also a lot of elderly persons who are in the same boat as the medically fragile children. It just takes one kid visiting a grandparent in the nursing home,who hasn’t started exhibiting symptoms to infect a large swath of the residents in that home with, say, pertussis. It is not inconceivable that exposure to that one sick child could kill several of those residents, including grandma.

Who are you to judge the choices a parent makes as invalid simply because they are different than your own?

It has nothing to do with their choice being different than my own and everything to do with putting the lives of others in danger. And I am not judging them invalid, though I certainly think they are. I am merely pointing out that those children should not be allowed in a position where they are a potential danger to others. I accept that, as distasteful as it is, parents have a right to not vaccinate their children. But given that acceptance, those parents should accept that they do not, or at least should not have a right to endanger others with their bad decisions. I should have a right to send my kids to school, secure in the knowledge that even if something didn’t work out just right in regards to their vaccines, they’re not in any significant risk of contracting an illness that could endanger their lives. Or that they are going to carry an illness home with them, that might make it’s way to my grandmother who would be unlikely to survive a bout of whooping cough and who also requires a great deal of care from the family. Chicken pox – while she might survive, it would certainly reduce the time she has left with us.

I can accept their right not to vaccinate their children. I cannot accept that they have an inherent right to put anyone else at risk. I do not base this on my own opinion either. Science based medicine and the evidence accrued through the scientific study of disease and vaccines supports every assertion I have made here. My position is not informed by discredited quacks who have nothing and shift the burden of proof, whenever a position they take has been compromised. It is not informed by something I saw on Oprah, or espoused by some celebrity who hasn’t the least bit of medical or even science training. My position is based on study after study that has indicated the quacks are wrong, Oprah and those other celebrities are wrong and that parents who choose not to vaccinate are wrong. A simple perusal of the CDC website, will allow you to search for outbreaks of diseases here in the U.S. that were all but eradicated. It will also make it clear that those outbreaks center around areas with substantially large percentages of vaccine exemptions.

I am sorry to be so blunt and harsh about it, but I have a right to protect my children and their friends from irresponsible parents and their children, who are the unfortunate victims of their parent’s ignorance.

Vaccines carry risks and benefits. Who are you to judge the choices a parent makes as invalid simply because they are different than your own?

Barbara,

With all due respect, you’re making a strawman argument here. This isn’t about criticizing choices simply because they’re different. It’s about reaching conclusions based on data.

I certainly don’t dispute your right to question how the conclusions were reached and the data on which they’re based, especially when it comes to your own children. But to dismiss them as nothing more than than a demand for conformity is a gross mischaracterization. Not to mention a poor way to make decisions that could be critical a child’s health.

That is actually a falsehood based, I guess, on confirmation bias.

Who are you to judge the choices a parent makes as invalid simply because they are different than your own?

I think DuWayne is making a judgment on the basis of best practices in medicine, not his own opinion. That’s what I would do, anyway. And given that, no, a random parent does not measure up to best practices for general advice. A reasonably well informed parent does not measure up to best practices, for that matter.

As parents, we are entrusted with the care of our children. We owe it to them to make thoughtful decisions. The human body is an awe-inspiring complex thing – why would one patently discount opposing views, as they almost always lead to something previoiusly unknown? Vaccines carry risks and benefits. Who are you to judge the choices a parent makes as invalid simply because they are different than your own?

Greg – that general sense of ickiness to which you refer is a powerful indicator that this is a question that should continue to come under literal and figurative microscopic scrutiny.

Matt – I am relieved to hear that Carrie is doing well. Please know that even though we’re strangers, I am thinking of your family and wishing you all well.

And to your comment, “Do we really believe that there’s this massive conspiracy of people who want to circumvent all of their training and ethics in order to hurt our children?” I say, no. I don’t believe that. I do think that they are human, and as such are imperfect. There’s a lot that even they do not know, regardless of their best intentions and education. We cannot hold them to unreasonable standards and empower them to have a disproportionate responsibility for our health and well-being. We do have the right, and should execute the privelege, of asking questions, of pushing them to learn more, of challenging them to calm our fears before they shoot us up with whatever they currently deem necessary in a syringe.

That really depends on whether or not their children are vaccinated or not. If they are, then the parents needn’t be. If they aren’t and don’t have a medically legitimate reason for not being vaccinated, I will happily not paint them with the same brush, as long as they keep their children out of public schools. And preferably public parks and other places they might pick something up or pass something along.

I am sure that you believe that it is best to ignore the evidence and ignore the experts. I am sure that you believe this is the best for your child/ren, if you have any. But let me ask you this; If your child fell out of a tree and broke his or her leg, would you not rely on the same experts who are recommending you vaccinate your child to take care of that broken leg before deciding you would set it and bind it, hoping for the best? If horribly, your child fell ill with pertussis, would you not rely on that expert who recommended you vaccinate your child against it, to help make him or her better? Do you actually believe you understand this better than your child’s pediatrician – you who presumably didn’t spend nearly a decade in school studying the art of medicine? Do you actually believe that every single study that has been done and failed completely to find links between vaccines and autism is bullshit? Do you actually believe it is better not to listen to your child’s pediatrician, because of an infinitesimal risk that your child is going to be that one in several hundred thousand, to have an adverse reaction? Because while there are certainly still risks, evidence based medicine marches on and doctors now know that children with a variety of congenital conditions are significantly more likely to have an adverse reaction.

As a parent, I understand and empathize with the fear that something bad might happen to my children. Indeed, I am so very concerned about my children’s well being, that I could not even consider not having them vaccinated. While most kids do survive pertussis, kids who get whooping cough are exponentially more likely to die horribly, literally coughing themselves to death – choking on their own phlegm, than they are of having a significant reaction to the pertussis vaccine. While most kids come through the mumps ok, it is far more likely that a child who contracts mumps is going to end up either blind or dead, than it is they are going to have a significant reaction to the vaccine.

So Barbara, if you have kids who have not been vaccinated and could have been, please do them a favor, do the kids who simply didn’t develop anti-bodies a favor and most importantly, do the medically fragile children a favor – homeschool. Don’t send them to one of those damned Waldorf schools or other schools packed with kids who aren’t vaccinated – they are likely to get sick there. And don’t send them to public schools, where they might get sick or be the one who gets other kids sick. It really is best if you just keep them at home where they will be safe and everyone else will be safe from them.

At the very least, I hope you inform the parents of children that you kids interact with socially of your children’s unvaccinated status. Some of us really do prefer that our kids be as far away from yours as possible – especially parents of kids who for whatever reason, aren’t protected by vaccines.

Read the package inserts to any of the childhood vaccines, specifically the ingredients….

The problem with this is that there is so much deliberate misinformation and scare tactics regarding vaccine ingredients. For example, claims that vaccines contain antifreeze (ethylene glycol). They don’t, but they do contain polyethylene glycol. It sounds really similar, and there is a chemical relationship between them. But from a toxicological standpoint, they are completely incomparable.

This comes back to Greg’s point on airplanes. Unless you know a lot of chemistry, biochemistry, and/or toxicology, simply reading the ingredients in a vaccine can’t help you make an informed decision. Nor can you easily learn on your own via the web. Too many people tell deliberate lies about vaccines. If you don’t already know enough to distinguish the truth from the lies, it’s nearly hopeless.