I’m on a vaccine kick lately. My son is at that age, after all, so I’ve been doing research, which means it’s on my mind. While I’m okay with delaying or spreading out vaccines a bit, especially where the disease is unlikely to be caught before vaccination can occur, I am very much pro-vax for most vaccines available.
The more research I do, and the more I consider the reasons people give for not vaccinating, the more frustrated I become with the reasons for altogether refusing vaccines.
Let’s look at this one: the safety of vaccines.
First of all, vaccines are pretty dang safe. The majority of adverse effects are minor and pass within a few days. As a trade-off for protection against diseases with serious complications, up to and including permanent damage and death, some fussiness or a bit of a fever is not a big deal. And even with the occasional more serious complications (a chance of one in thousands or even one in millions), the child almost always fully recovers, and we’re still better off than we would be letting these diseases run rampant.
And for those of you who still believe that vaccines cause autism: they don’t. Nope, not even MMR, especially since the ingredient suspected of doing so has been out of the vaccine for years.
To be more specific, a meta-study was done. A meta-study is a study of studies, eventually. Studies on a particular topic are all compiled together, and the ones that meet certain standards are chosen. So only the best, most reliable, most scientific studies are used. The meta-study then looks at the conclusions and data in these multiple studies, and comes to an overall conclusion. This meta-study concluded that, surprise! vaccines, including MMR, are not at all linked to autism.
Here’s the kicker, though. We’re all worried about how these vaccines are effecting our children, but we’re a culture full of prescription drugs, some of which are for far less serious things than diphtheria or the measles.
I mean really, think about it.
If you take birth control pills but refuse vaccines for your child, you’re a hypocrite. People die from the pill. Yet what it’s used for in most cases — preventing pregnancy — has much safer and more natural means of achieving the same goal. And here you are, popping a pill every day, loading your body up with artificial hormones for months at a time, while denying your child protection from deadly diseases.
Vaccines cause so few deaths that it is difficult to even assess the risk.
For instance, out of reports of death reported to VAERS (the vaccine monitoring system) from 1990-1992, one one seems to actually have been legitimately associated with a vaccine. That means that, out of tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of children vaccinated over those years, only one perhaps died from it. On the other hand, if we didn’t vaccinate, hundreds would die from diseases every year. That means that vaccines are far more beneficial than they are risky.
Do me a favor. Go look at the insert on a bottle of tylenol or ibuprofen. Or even better, a prescription drug. We have drugs with potential adverse side effects in our medicine cabinet, and many of these are far more likely to have a serious side effect or result in death than vaccines. Some of them protect and save lives. Some of theme just make you feel a bit better. Yet even the ones that aren’t necessary to protect your life, you’ll take. And the ones that can protect and even save your life (antibiotics, for instance), you’ll hardly question. You’d definitely give them to your child as prescribed by a doctor, sometimes just to relieve symptoms because you don’t want your child to suffer. Yet you won’t protect your child from serious diseases with a handful of shots. That is so illogical, it isn’t even funny.
If we could keep vaccination rates up worldwide, these diseases would be eradicated the way we eradicated smallpox, and vaccinations against them wouldn’t be necessary any longer. Until they are declared eradicated, lowering vaccination rates causes outbreaks and allows the diseases to continue to exist. Consider this:
Three countries – Great Britain, Sweden, and Japan – cut back the use of pertussis vaccine because of fear about the vaccine. The effect was dramatic and immediate. In Great Britain, a drop in pertussis vaccination in 1974 was followed by an epidemic of more than 100,000 cases of pertussis and 36 deaths by 1978. In Japan, around the same time, a drop in vaccination rates from 70% to 20%-40% led to a jump in pertussis from 393 cases and no deaths in 1974 to 13,000 cases and 41 deaths in 1979. In Sweden, the annual incidence rate of pertussis per 100,000 children 0-6 years of age increased from 700 cases in 1981 to 3,200 in 1985. It seems clear from these experiences that not only would diseases not be disappearing without vaccines, but if we were to stop vaccinating, they would come back.
Of more immediate interest is the major epidemic of diphtheria which occurred in the former Soviet Union from 1989 to 1994, where low primary immunization rates for children and the lack of booster vaccinations for adults have resulted in an increase from 839 cases in 1989 to nearly 50,000 cases and 1,700 deaths in 1994. There have already been at least 20 imported cases in Europe and two cases in U.S. citizens working in the former Soviet Union.
So go ahead, take that tylenol or birth control pill. But please, get your child vaccinated, too.
The Life of Lee 