Uh, no, I don’t remember those parties.

They might have been regional, you might not have needed to catch chickenpox from one, or they might have happened before your time. I remember in the late 1960’s, probably 1969, my neighbor’s daughter had chickenpox. All the uninfected kids went there, including my kid brother, as I recall. I don’t remember when I had chickenpox (which puts it before about 1966), but I know that I did.

I’m also old enough to remember when Smallpox vaccinations still took place. There were major concerns about smallpox because it hadn’t been eradicated yet. Likewise, there were other serious outbreaks when I was a kid and getting vaccinated, for things where vaccination was possible, was very important.

Speaking of MMR, I knew people who were affected by their mother’s contracting one of those illnesses before they were born and I’m grateful those vaccinations exist today.

It’s like everyone forgets how crazy things were before vaccinations for many of those illnesses were commonplace, and because they’ve forgotten the reasons they were so important are forgotten as well.

I’m with the posters who’ve said the being vaccinated is a social obligation. You want to be a part of society where those of us who are “pro-vaxx” live and work? Well, get your vaccinations, otherwise I support the government keeping your kids out of schools. I don’t want to find out that the MMR shots my son has had were the rare “ineffective” ones when your kid with some preventable disease shows up.

I know a lot more than 75% of doctors about hormones, and I know that from reading the internet and talking to people. I mean wow. That surprised me, too. I thought docs would know their stuff, research if they didn’t, but I had way too high expectations for doctors.

Same thing for psychiatrists, who have done medicine then an added specialization afterwards, yet they’re sometimes extremely clueless as well (about things in general, not even just hormones).

Which is not to say that vaccines don’t have risks; they do. We may not know what they all are. But the individual risk of vaccination has to be weighed not only against the individual risk of remaining vaccinated, but against the collective risk of lower population resistance to disease.

As parents, we all have to make heart decisions each day on behalf of our children. If they decide at an older age to be vaccinated that is their decision. There is autism in our family and we decided the risk was too high to vaccinate. We choose to risk chickenpox the old fashioned way. Today, as parents, we still have a say as to what doctors can do to our children. I fear when my children are old enough to be parents that will not be the case.

1) An unvaccinated kid is contagious! Remember, the *risk* of getting a disease is relative to the *risk* of exposure.

2)The vaccine will provide your kid w/absolute immunity! Let me ask you this: assuming you’ve had the polio vaccine, would you swap spit with a known infected-with-polio person???

My daughters’ FORMER pediatrician once declared to me with absolute certainty and confidence in her stride that vaccines no longer contain mercury in this country. With confidence, I vaccinated my older daughter who developed PDD-NOS, a form of autism. Eventually, when it came time to make the choices for my younger child, I did what should have been done in the first place: I asked for the package inserts and read them. Two of the vaccines, Hep-B, I believe, and one other contained “trace” Thimerosal. In addition to those, every vaccine, every single one, uses other heavy metals as adjuvants. These are substances designed to irritate the immune system so that simultaneously with the presence of the disease microbes, the system responds aggressively to build up antibodies to the foreign bodies thus requiring about a fifth of the amount of injections. I read it and said no to the vaccines. Perhaps it is a coincidence, perhaps it is not, but my older vaccinated child is autistic, and my younger, unvaccinated child is not.

There is something going on with Congress’s desire to protect pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits that I do not think it is melodramatic to call a conspiracy hiding in plain sight. Here is a link from just one story I have seen on this subject:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/doctors-against-research_b_17726.html

In this particular story, the mainstream medical community is the culprit more than Congress, which surprises me not a whit. Doctors get a great deal of benefits from pharmaceutical companies, and besides, they tend to believe rather myopically in the gospel of what they learned in medical school.

Another I saw said that in May of last year, a bill in Congress sought to give vaccine manufacturers even more protections from lawsuits than they already have under the Homeland Security Act.

Before I go on, here is that link:

http://www.shirleys-wellness-cafe.com/vaccine_policy.htm#dragon

Did you hear about that whole shebang? Bush pushed for the vaccine lawsuit unidemnity provision over and over, the Democrats in Congress fought it repeatedly, the Republicans put it into the Homeland Security Act, and when the Democrats refused to sign the Act because of THAT provision, the Republicans called them Un-American and weak on defending the country. Then, the Republicans took that amendment out, the Democrats signed the Act, and in the dead of night, someone took the signed bill, put the amendment back in, and handed it to the president. Rumor has had it that it was Bill Frist.

Honest to Heaven, I’m wrapping this up as fast as possible. I want to move back to New York from Louisiana and I am finding myself facing obstacles trying to find out how to not have to vaccinate my children that might make the author of the blog want to rethink her position that forced pregnancy and forced vaccinations are not similar.

1) There are no exemptions for reasons of philosophy or conscience in New York. There are only exemptions for medical reasons or religious reasons. This is the tip of the iceberg.

2) The Department of Health has the right, at least they think they do, to make an applicant detail what religion they’re part of and exactly what provision of their faith excludes vaccinations. Not to mention, isn’t it discrimination against people who are atheists or agnostics but who hold the convictions that they do about what to put in their bodies that are just as morally or ethically based? That seems to me to be an unreasonable intrusion into matters of faith. Geez, if I need a letter from my mom too, I’m SOL because she died in 1993.

A medical exemption must be signed by a doctor. I cannot just explain my concerns; a doctor has to say my reasons are valid as if I’m an idiot. I have contacted several medical doctors who are also naturopaths or who specialize in environmental medicine and every one of them claims to have no knowledge whatsoever of these letters or what to say in one. I can’t really ask the DOH what constitutes a legit medical reason because they’ll just say, “Well, tell us what your reason is and we’ll tell you if we like it or not,” which may ruin other explanations I might use later. I cannot get a doctor to tell me what the DOH’s legit medical reasons are because nobody knows. I cannot even be sure which religious reasons they’ll accept. For example, both Judaism and Catholicism have religious reasons for objections (Leviticus and mixing human with animal blood, and, some vaccines made from materials found in human aborted fetuses, respectively), but who knows if they’re going to say, “Well we have 50 Jews and 40 Catholics in this department and all but one of those have vaccinated children, so, sorry.” One parent in upstate New York claimed a religious exemption and under force faced state DOH LAWYERS (!) to answer an inquisition about her faith. They grilled her mercilessly and turned her down.

So, in short, in the state of New York this is made so incredibly, impossibly difficult, that I am basically wondering if I will have any ability to move back home…to MY HOME…where I was born and lived for 30 years.

Unfortunately, because there is such organized suppression against research into vaccines as a cause of autism, the bill from 2005 meant to PROHIBIT ANY FURTHER RESEARCH INTO THE CONNECTION by the way, we parents and our children are quite trapped. The most important thing we don’t know is whether or not there are some children who because of a variety of biological factors do NOT have the ability to respond well to vaccines. If they’d allow the question out of the closet, and could discover a connection (if one exists), they could develop a test that would let us know which kids can and cannot have them, and we can all forever retire from this debate.

(P.U.I.D.S, who apologizes for the length of this post and the blog space I’ve occupied)

My grandfather and my wife had attacks of shingles, and it’s a nasty, painful condition. You don’t want it, and you don’t want your children to have it later in life. Get them vaccinated.

The Sacred Pond of Ogi, Nigeria, was contaminated with the water fleas that were infected with the Guinea worm larvae. Villagers, holding to traditional beliefs, initially tried to dissuade health officials from treating the water

Food for thought.

Suppose (for the sake of argument) that we come up with scientific proof that women who have abortions are more likely spread disease, or otherwise compromise public health.

Would the government then be justified in outlawing abortions for the “greater good”?

Sure, it’s a contrived example. Perhaps the science on vaccines is bulletproof. But once the principle of coercion by the state in personal health matters is established, it is not that difficult to extend.

For the record, there are places in the US where it’s difficult to get by without the full complement of vaccines. Public schools won’t let you in if you don’t have ‘em. If you’re not in school, you can be taken away from your parents, etc.

Ask the elders in your family what life was like before vaccines if you ever are made nervous about them. Look at your family tree and notice how many children used to die-all of my grandparents lost very young siblings to communicable disease, and two adult siblings died in the influenza epidemic of the early twentieth century. In my husbands’ country, where polio and measles still kill unimmunized children- along with hep B, typhoid, malaria, dengue, etc-choosing not to vaccinate is a luxury people don’t have. My daughter was vaccinated against TB even- a disease most Americans don’t get vaccinated against anymore. I’d like to see how long anti-vaxers stick to their guns when they travel to foreign countries such as my husbands’.

Vaccinations should not be forced, but very strongly encouraged. This debate, if you can call discourse with such misguided people a debate, be settled once and for all with the bird flu. No atheists in foxholes and all that.

I also think I was looking at the “herd immunity” thing, because that is one of the strongest protections we have for the people who cannot be vaccinated. And I know I was thinking, “If there’s going to be a resurgence of, say, rubella because too many people are opting out of the vaccination, then by golly my kids are going to be protected.” After having grown up listening to my grandparents and my parents and aunts and uncles talking about epidemics at various times, I definitely wanted to do my bit to prevent that kind of stuff happening to my kids if I could. The story of my mother’s high school boyfriend, who died of polio three weeks before prom, I would definitely say influenced me strongly toward a pro-vaccination stance, as well.

IMO, I think the comparison of forced pregnancy with forced vaccination is striking but false. Forced pregnancy is passive - the government is requiring that no action be taken to change a process (a fetus becoming a baby) already underway. Forced vaccination, on the other hand, is active - the government is requiring an action (the introduction of an injected or orally administered agent) that prevents or changes a process that hasn’t happened yet.

As for the forced v. pressured, what would the reason be behind denying schooling to someone who poses no potential physical threat to other students? The better analogy (to me at least) of vaccination would be a weapon being brought to school.

At best, in the case of pregnancy, the girls are bringing back with them a bad or sad attitude, and (hopefully) a bit of wisdom about why contraceptive use is so important.

But my point wasn’t that mandatory vaccination and forced pregnancy were the same, or even that they’re similar. That’s obviously stupid. It was that people object to coercive measures that would increase the number of forced pregnancies by asserting a right to bodily autonomy (a position I’d support). But some of those same people seem to abandon that principle when it comes to mandatory vaccination, saying it’s justified to protect others, and I’m not sure you can consistantly hold both opinions. If people have a right to bodily autonomy in pregancy they have the same right with regard to vaccination.

Regarding your two points:

(1) “[Paraphrasing] A forced pregnancy is done to secure the health of a potential person, while mandatory vaccination is done to secure the health of a fully endowed person.” I’m not going to argue with that, because it demonstrates my point. You’re not supporting abortion here because of a right to bodily autonomy, your grounds is personhood. If a personhood detector was invented tomorrow and the fetus registered positive, then your argument would fall and the justfication based upon bodily autonomy would still stand.

(2) “Forced versus Pressured” All I will say is that if girls who had had an abortion were denied a publicly funded education then you would be up in arms, and rightly so. Similarly you would presumably be against bureaucratic hurdles being placed in the way of pregnant women being allowed to exercise their autonomy. I think what I’m getting at is that having a theoretical right to bodily autonomy isn’t worth much if undue influence can be brought to bear regarding your exercise of it, which is something pro-abortion campaigners have recognised for a long time.

Vaccine issues have improved since my first child was born in 1991. I asked for one dose of the killed (Salk) polio vaccine before starting with the oral (Sabin) and was told that I was nuts and that I would have to pay for it out of pocket, despite the fact that the Sabin vaccine is the leading cause of polio in the US. Soon after, the CDC switched to my crazy lunatic scheme, and now you won’t find an oral vaccine anywhere.

Similarly, it was acknowledged that the whole cell pertussis vaccine is allergenic and that kids who have a mild reaction to the second shot shouldn’t be given the third shot. And eventually the acellular vaccine became available.

They don’t give the Hepatitis B at birth now unless the mother is known to be infected.

Personally, I started my kids’ vaccination much later than the “schedule,” but eventually completed everything except HiB (and of course the new rotavirus). Thus my children are contributing to herd immunity but weren’t as much at risk for SIDS, autism, etc. Of course I didn’t know about the cumulative mercury dose per body weight issue at the time that I made those decisions.

I went ahead with the varicella last year when my oldest turned 14, after several failed attempts at intentional exposure. I expect that, like measles, it won’t provide lifetime immunity and they’ll need new shots regularly.

The 70,000 figure is the 70,000 who were infected (received the contaminated batch) with the polio from the vaccine - the reason only 10 died is because *most* people infected with the virus recover/ are not damaged.

Please provide a cite for this? Not some book at amazon I need to buy.

I don’t see why I have to provide citations but pro arguments do not.

Fair enough. The numbers I used came from Rotary International. and the National Health Museam

I love how anti-vaccine science is just “bad” science, but research supprting vaccines (even the most ardent supporters of vaccines admit some children are injured and killed each year) is the “good science”

Virtually eradicating polio is good science. Do vaccines infect or harm some children? Yes. But polio is almost a thing of the past now. Do you remember what it was like? Do you have any clue? Before polio vaccine was available, 13,000 to 20,000 cases of paralytic polio were reported each year in the United States. These annual epidemics of polio often left thousands of victims–mostly children–in braces, crutches, wheelchairs, and iron lungs. The effects were life-long. Now an average of 8 kids get polio. Yes those 8 are from the vaccine, but 8 is better than 13000 isn’t it?

I asked my mom about this, she is 80. She remembers being kept home from school because it was rumored a child was ill. She remembers kids she went to school with who got sick and never came back. She remembers when polio was epidemic, panic in communities when it was certain that someone had been diagnosed with polio I told her there were people who thought that vaccines were bad now because some children had reactions or got polio from the vaccine. Her reaction was disbelief. She did not understand why anyone would want to go back to the bad times.

While I can understand a parents fear that their child might have a reaction to a vaccine, I do not understand your ascertain that vaccination does not work to eliminate or diminish the threat of contagious disease.