i do not and will not vaccinate my children. neither my husband or myself get vaccinated. i am well educated about what is in the vaccines and what the side effects are of said vaccines.
"Well educated" as in you or your husband has an MD or PhD in Pharmacology? Or even a Masters in a related field? Or even a nurse helping with clinical trials? Or rather is your vaccination education due to just what you've read on the internet and/or what others have told you? When it comes to vaccines, there is so much misinformation that unless you actually work in the field, I'd highly doubt the worth of the education you've had about vaccines. This is not to say that you are not well educated in general, just not in this particular field. In fact, it is mostly people in well-educated, affluent neighborhoods that don't want to vaccinate their children because of their beliefs in a possible threat that vaccines pose (
http://www.livescience.com/43577-why-rich-educated-parents-avoid-vaccinations.html).
not to mention the fact that my cousin received a flu shot and due to the serious side effects caused by the flu shot has been paralyzed for several years. went from being able to walk to getting his flu shot to slowly losing his ability to walk to not being able to move his lower limbs at all.
I had a friend that got rushed to the hospital because he was allergic to peanuts and ate a cookie that contained them. This doesn't mean that peanuts are always toxic, but rather one person had a bad reaction to peanuts... Similarly, when a medicine is considered safe, it doesn't mean that nobody will have a bad reaction to it, but rather for the majority of the population they won't have any serious side-effects. This is why science / medicine doesn't rely on anecdotal evidence (as you have illustrated) but rather uses experiments in order to gather enough data to have statistically relevant conclusions based on those experiments. Now since the flu itself is usually not that serious of a condition (except in immune-compromised individuals), and considering that the person is a relative, I too might be cautious in taking the flu vaccine were I in your shoes. But this doesn't mean that all vaccines are dangerous or even dangerous to you. And since there are vaccines to some diseases that may be life-threatening, I'd still get the vaccines for those most deadly diseases.
i do not rely on a herd mentality as others have stated to protect my child but his own immune system. not only that but i do not let my child eat junk that is so prevalent in most children's diets these days. he is soon to be two and has never had pop or candy and will not be having either anytime soon.
First, everyone that is vaccinated relies on their own immune system to combat the disease. That is the purpose of vaccines; they are given to people to prepare that person's immune system for the actual disease. It allows a person's immune system to recognize the disease when a person first contracts it so that it can fight off the disease before the disease gets a solid foothold in their system. Without being vaccinated, a person's body must spend a longer time trying to determine the best antibodies to use to combat the infection as well as time to produce those antibodies to a high enough level that it can eventually overcome the infection. But because the reproduction time is usually very quick, prolonging the period before your body can actually start fighting off the infection may cause more severe issues, may cause irreversible damages, or may give the infection too much of a head-start that the body won't be able to fight off the infection using the immune system by itself. Although healthy nutrition helps to maintain a healthy immune system, even the healthiest immune systems may have issues combating certain diseases without the help of being primed beforehand by a vaccine against that disease.
Second, herd immunization (not "mentality") occurs whether or not you subscribe to that rationale for keeping your child healthy. Essentially if everyone in a community is vaccinated against a disease, then there is less of a chance that even were that community exposed to the disease, the individuals in that community could fight off the infection before the disease has a chance to become contagious (or at least decreases the time that the infected person is contagious). So as long as you remain in that community, the chance of contracting the disease is lessened. However, if you come into contact with someone outside of the community, you run the risk of contracting the disease as happened to a town in Minnesota where a family that hadn't been vaccinated traveled out of country and contracted measles, bringing it back to Minnesota where it went on to infect over 20 people before the outbreak was finally contained (
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-one-unvaccinated-child-sparked-minnesota-measles-outbreak/). Moreover, herd immunization only occurs in communities where 90%+ of its population has been vaccinated. However if you start getting more people in a community that are also scared of vaccines, you start deteriorating this herd immunity (if not completely rid the community of it) thereby putting not only those not vaccinated at risk, but also everyone else in the community.
you must also ask yourself if all vaccines were so safe would they really need a compensation fund for those that the vaccines kill or hurt???
As I mentioned before, just because a vaccine is deemed as safe among the general population doesn't negate the possibility that some person may have a serious reaction to it. So having insurance (or some other fund) against that possibility is just being prudent, and not an expression of guilt. Similarly just because your day-to-day living should cause a fire doesn't mean that you don't need fire alarms / smoke detectors nor home-owners insurance to protect you against the remote (but still plausible) chance of your house catching on fire.
Community Forum
Topic: Vaccinations (Read 3056 times)
October 16, 2010, 02:15:01 pm
