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Why I vaccinate
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.
Mirrored from Now Showing!.
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I'm getting more and more disgusted by the stance that Autism is the worst thing to ever happen to anyone ever and that children need to be "saved" from it. Look. Some people are Autistic. Some are profoundly affected by it, others aren't. One can be Autistic and also have OCD or ODD or ADHD or Schizophrenia or anything else someone who isn't Autistic has. One can be Autistic and have friends and a caring family and a job and a life. Also: one can be Autistic and be an adult, and constantly presenting Autism as The Worst Thing Ever does not do people living with Autism any favors, nor does it assist Autistic adults who need more support and help in the form of therapy, medication, assisted living, etc when so much Autism Money is raised to deal with vaccines, which don't cause Autism. Y'dig?
I'm glad you're willing to spend the time and energy debunking your friends' misinformation. I have 2 female friends who were virgins when they married, never had sex with anyone but their husbands, and contracted cervical cancer from HPV because their husbands' had sex lives prior to them. Gardisil is often presented as the slut vaccine or something, and it's not. It's a vaccine that can save a woman from fertility issues and cancer, a cancer that can be deadly if untreated, and how many women have insurance that covers regular pap smears let alone cancer treatment? Not enough.
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Whooping cough is not pretty. It's long and painful and terrible to watch, and it's easily prevented with a common vaccination-- the tetanus shot.
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As I said, I have asthma, and while it's not BAD day to day, coughing related illnesses knock me on my ass for far too long. At the last non-temp job I worked, whooping cough also swept through my building because my supervisor's girlfriend's co-worker didn't "believe" in vaccinations (dude, they aren't GOD, your belief in their efficacy doesn't make them more or less effective) and his kid contracted it and spread it around like wildfire. I lived in FEAR both for myself and for my other supervisor, who was immonusuppressed, and who wound up going out and buying a huge case of those disinfecting wipes. We started wiping down all hard surfaces plus phones and keyboards twice a day.
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Anyway, the way people dismiss childhood diseases like chicken pox as rites of passage, as you say, really annoys me because you can't tell when a child is going to have a "normal" experience and when it's going to become a serious medical problem. That statistical unlikeliness really diminishes in importance when it's happening to you or someone you love.
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A friend of mine got pox inside her throat, and in her vagina. It can be a really terrible disease. One of the kids in my neighborhood developed encephalitis as a complication and suffered permanent brain damage. I'm glad you survived.
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Some day I will talk about women, children, and modern medicine. Some day I will talk about the myth of instant maternal affection and bonding and how it is a myth we can indulge at all only in the modern era. Some day I will talk about the faerie, and why we tell ourselves stories about a people who steal human children, or take in the abandoned.
It's a privilege to be outlived by your children; it's a privilege to not have to make the choice between the children you have and the infant you've just borne.
I was vaccinated, I will vaccinate (barring serious concerns such as an allergy), and I think people who do not vaccinate for fear of autism or other things are reprehensible for not doing their research -- and the people who encourage such fear are unspeakable.
I actually saw someone say no one dies of pertussis, once. I want to ship them all back in time, to the 1800s, where they can listen an entire town's children die of it.
I think what infuriates me is that -- it's not been that long and yet people have forgotten the horrors enough to risk them again. They couldn't have possibly had the chance to not know the horror in their bones, if other people hadn't vaccinated.
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So I was vaccinated for chicken pox at the age of 26. The first dose gave me only a localized reaction. The repeat dose, a month later, had me feverish, migraine-y, with diarrhea and intense nausea, in the middle of a heat wave. But I would do it again in an instant, if I were told the batch was bad and would not protect me. Because I heard it is one really awful thing to catch once you are an adult. The weird thing was that I was in contact with chicken pox so many times, prior to being vaccinated, that it's almost unnatural that I never caught it.
Same went with the H1N1 influenza vaccine from last year. I got the vaccination, and barely had any side effects from it. A mild headache and some drowsiness the next day. Nothing to be alarmed about.
So I will vaccinate my kids, no questions asked, unless they have a known allergy to one of the components of the vaccine.
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I've never had a reaction to a flu shot; I think I'm very lucky in that regard. :)
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As you may know, I work at a pediatric hospital. Earlier this year (though it may have been last year -- my sense of time has been blurring together lately), there was an outbreak of measles in one of the outpatient clinics (either the neuro or epilepsy one). It's not that my hospital is filthy. It's the fact that sickness lives in hospitals. So, if you bring your unvaccinated child to a place that literally houses disease, what the hell do you think is going to happen?
In the winter, we had pertussis (which has to be my favourite name ever for a disease, seriously) sweep through the ER waiting room. Honestly, there's no excuse for Oregon Trail diseases infecting kids anymore.
In all honestly, I want to see Jenny McCarthy tried for manslaughter. Really, I do. Apparently, she retracted her opinion on vaccines, but it wasn't widely publicized (I didn't found out about it until two or three weeks ago). The damage she has singlehandedly done with her celebrity status is appalling. It's because of her skewed logic that we have children seriously ill. And you know what? What if these outbreaks had occurred in the outpatient oncology clinic? It doesn't matter if those kids had been vaccinated -- they don't have immune systems! The flu can kill them. There's no way they'd be able to stand up to a virus like measles.
So, in closing, thank you for doing the right thing and vaccinating your child. You have no idea how great of a thing that is.
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