I try to not do anything regarding parenthood without researching it a bit and really getting in tune with my gut feeling. Vaccines were something I kind of bounced around with when I was pregnant and a little after. I bounced around because a lot of the stuff I do, like not circumcising, breastfeeding, co-sleeping, baby wearing, cloth diapering, and elimination communication are grouped into this Natural Parenting category and a lot of those sites and books talk about how horrible vaccines are.
So I did some reading and parents claim the vaccines cause so many things that I just can't find any real evidence for. I'm not saying it's not possible that vaccines can ruin immune systems (hey vaccines do affect immune systems fundamentally), but I've gotten all my vaccines and recently had to get re-vaccinated against a couple things that didn't take the first time, and as far as I know, I'm pretty healthy.
I realize that "me" is a small sample size. But I think the majority of babies get vaccinated today and the majority are just fine.
To imagine a world without vaccines all you have to do is to talk with people like my grandparents who remember the days when kids were paralyzed by polio, who had several kids come down with the measles, who had family members get whooping cough very young. The diseases these vaccines protect against are very real and can be deadly. I decided that the small risk of vaccination was less than the risk of my baby possibly getting one of these possibly deadly diseases.
There are some people that can't get vaccines. A good example is babies and young children too young for certain vaccines. Some people are also allergic to some of the ingredients in the vaccines. Some people have other medical complications that make vaccines more dangerous. But there is this amazing, amazing, amazing thing called the herd effect. The herd effect is when about 85% of the population is vaccinated against a certain illness the risk of the illness for the entire population is nearly 0%. This means that if 85% of you went out and got your flu vaccines my little baby, who is too young for the flu vaccine, would still be protected against it.
This is why there was such a drop in things like whooping cough and German measles and polio, because a good 85% of people were vaccinated against these illnesses in the United States.
Getting yourself vaccinated and your healthy children who can get the vaccines vaccinated not only protects them, it protects those who would get vaccinated if they could, but can't. I'm not only protecting Cedric from these diseases, I'm protecting the babies out there who are too young or too ill.
If this anti-vaccine craze continues for too long it could have devastating effects on our over all public health.
That being said we did opt out of a couple things. We didn't get him the Hep B vaccine yet. From what I've read, Hep B is so rarely picked up by babies and young children. We decided to get him the Hep B vaccine before he is sexually active (when he could actually catch it). Since they get so many vaccines this first year, we figured putting off one would be good.
We also refused the E-mycin in the eyes after birth because it also seemed unnecessary since I didn't have any STIs. This one we got some guff for in the hospital and had to refuse it several times before they left us alone. I wanted to say something like, "look, I'm a smart person who researches this stuff and I don't want it!"
So my unwelcome advice is to get the vaccines that make sense for your family, delay them if you want to, but really, if your child can handle them, it's really a great thing to do for them and those who don't have a choice in vaccinating.
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