brigid | Why I vaccinate (Reply)

It’s the tail end of vaccine awareness week, and if I’d had my act together I would have posted more about this issue, including more links. Instead, I’m going to write a bit about why I vaccinate my kid.

I know people who had polio, spent years and years and years of difficult physical therapy to relearn how to walk, use their arms/hands, breathe, etc and now have post-polio and live in constant pain. The polio vaccine works.
Many of the childhood illness vaccines prevent are not deadly, but can cause brain damage, blindness, and paralysis. I don’t want my kid to get that sick, and I don’t want any other kids to get that sick from him.
Although I’ve been regularly immunized, I have no Rubella antibodies, which means that if I’d contracted Rubella while pregnant, I had a high chance of miscarriage or of Niko developing fetal anomolies. Vaccines don’t work 100% which is part of why vaccinating MANY people is necessary. The more people you vaccinate, the better off everyone is when it comes to suppressing or eradicating communicable disease.
I have asthma and scarring on my lungs/bronchia from years of chronic bronchitis and infections. I’m more healthy since I had my tonsils out (at the age of 20), but I still get colds, the flu, and bronchitis very easily and since I have asthma I often develop a racking cough that lasts for, literally, a month. I vaccinate myself to prevent getting the flu and I vaccinate my kid so he doesn’t get the flu or pass it on to me.
I have friends who are immunosuppressed and/or have tiny babies. I vaccinate to prevent the likelihood of passing something on to them.
I live in an area with a high immigrant population, which means a lot of kids (and adults) here who shop at the stores I shop at, who I tutor, etc aren’t vaccinated. TB, Hep A, Measles, and other communicable diseases exist in pockets in my neighborhood and while I wash my hands regularly, I have a 19 month old who licks things. All things. I’m not trying to say that my neighbors are, like, disease vectors or anything– they are human beings. But we’re more likely to be exposed to certain illnesses.
Study after study, independent research after independent research, has confirmed that vaccines do not cause Autism or Crohn’s Disease or mitochondrial problems. Take a good long look at the people claiming that vaccines are harmful. Strip out the worried parents from the picture and look at the “experts” and ask yourself: what are they selling? Are they, like “Dr” Wakefield, pushing a specific single vaccine that will line his pockets? Are they pushing dietary supplements? Harmful and expensive “alternative therapies”? Bear in mind that vaccines and administering vaccines costs less than the medication, time, and hospital stay required to treat the actual diseases they prevent.
Some people cannot be vaccinated. They are allergic to a component of the vaccine (eggs, for instance); they have suppressed immune systems; they have hemophilia and so a needle injection isn’t a great idea; etc. Vaccinating myself/my child protects these people.
Smallpox has been exterminated in the wild because of vaccines. Nobody gets smallpox anymore. Nobody dies of smallpox anymore. We have the chance to seize the future, to wield science like a weapon, and create a world where nobody contracts the measles, or mumps, or chickenpox, or whooping cough any more. We see these diseases primarily as childhood illnesses, rights of passage, and a few kids wind up dead or blind or with encephalitis or with broken ribs and pulled muscles from coughing and that’s sad but eh. It’s not statistically likely. WE HAVE THE CHANCE TO SAVE LIVES HERE.

There are reasons not to vaccinate, but those reasons are small and special ones and often linked to other health problems. Vaccinating YOUR child protects OTHER children. Vaccinating YOUR children is a very low risk thing to do, while it can save the lives, literally, of other babies and children and adults.

I vaccinate my child because I care about his health, and I care about my health, and I care about the health of people around me. I’ve read about my country’s history, about world history, and I’m aware of just how many children and babies died, how common young death was, how high infant mortality used to be. There’s a scene in the movie “Lord of the Rings” where someone comments on how gosh darned sad it is when a kid dies before his parent, how the world is out of order when that happens. That sure as hell was not in the book, written in the 1950s, when it was not uncommon for parents to look down on a tiny white coffin holding their hearts. Our past is so recent. We can make such drastic changes. Don’t let paranoid half-informed fear keep you from safeguarding our future.