Reply To: My Inner Thoughts On Vaccine Politics

Sariray – I applaud your courage in attempting to reason with some very antagonistic, angry, and closed-minded posters. You are the inspiration for this post. Although I have a Ph.D. in research and am the mother of nine children who have had a number of these childhood diseases, I’d like to remind us all that the heart of the debate (no, this is not about the world being round or flat, but bear in mind that for a very long time, society and scientists believed that the world was flat) is the risk/benefit ratio. If you have done due diligence in reviewing all the vaccine literature, and you have some knowledge of research design and statistical inference, it is clear that the research is, at best, inconclusive. More importantly, for a child that is vaccine-injured and for his/her parents, the vaccine was 100% harmful. Most childhood diseases that have supposedly been eradicated follow cyclical patterns and when there is an outbreak, the risks are minimal and occur for children whose health has been compromised. As far as vaccine risks, it is dishonest and/or delusional to deny that they don’t exist- see vaccine inserts, vaccine ingredients, the CDs’s “unavoidably unsafe” statement, VAERS’s accounts of vaccine injury, as well as the vaccine literature. If a medical protocol prescribed for HEALTHY children involves health risks, parents should have the right to refuse it. Period. And, no, they should not be required to move to Guatemala – they should be considerate and keep their children away from others when ill (measles symptoms (fever, hacking cough) occur before actual contagion which occurs four days before and four-five days after the rash onset). You are free to continue to demonize parents who chose not to vaccinate (they not anti-vaccines, they are pro-health- education and choice) but know that most of these parents, who have to swim upstream and against the tide, are better informed about vaccines than you are, and love their children as much as you love yours. May all yiddishe kinderluch (and their families) always be healthy.