Why so many anti-vaxxing mums

People don't see the cemeteries with half your great grandmother's kids dead before 5 years old because of now preventable childhood diseases. Their neighbors aren't disabled due to polio. They don't hear the neighbor's kid whooping and see them carted off in the ambulance. They don't see units filled with little babies on vents with RSV who will have problems for years to come if they survive. They've never seen a case of congenital rubella syndrome.

They rely on herd immunity.

They don't think it will happen to their kids until it does.

Ah but "modern medicine ". Which is true (if a little ironic) up to a point. But when your city has only 4 picu beds and your child is the fifth one needing them (and in a widespread outbreak of, say, measles this could easily happen) then your kid's in big trouble.

What makes you think people put little thought into it?

You know you have the privilege of making the decision to not vaccinate because you aren't routinely confronted with the effects of these diseases on children, down to the majority choosing to vaccinate? I imagine if your infant nephew died of whooping cough, your friend's kid was paralysed due to polio, your baby was covered in measles your opinion would be different.
It baffles me that anti vaxxers have no idea of the great privilege they hold in being able to make that decision.

There is no doubt about it, we live in a vastly more populated world with more opportunities to spread communicable disease than at any time in history. Even if there was any weight to these studies, I'd rather my child be autistic than dead.

The vast majority of American parents get their children vaccinated and are fully behind the idea.

The minority who don't tend to be very vocal zealots. They come from the looney fringes of religion and from the extremely crunchy end of Wellness.

Sadly we live in an era when many people cannot distinguish between reliable (the consensus of the medical profession) and unreliable (randoms on the internet) sources of information

Oh and it's easy to be anti vax when everyone else is vaccinating. Not so much when the clowns all join you.

@ThejoyofNC I suggest you have a walk round any cemetery and look at the ages of the children on the older graves.

Very few people in the west have even seen the diseases we vaccinate against let or experienced them themselves, let alone lived through an outbreak. When they have (and the way things are going they will) some may think differently and certainly their surviving children might.

No I wasn't

My uncle died of polio at 18 months in the pre vax days, it nearly destroyed my Nan. Anti vaxxers are clueless

I will never forget my grandma talking about all of her children who died, more than actually survived. Vaccines all the way, here.

Were you vaccinated?

Recognising a username is hardly taking notes. Maybe all the vaccines have just improved my memory lol.

Don't go on TikTok. There are loads of them. Proper fruit loops.

@ThejoyofNC

I put in lots of thought into whether to vaccinate my children. It went along the lines of.... am I a dr, no, am I a nurse, no, am I a public health researcher, no ... so I'll follow the advice the aforementioned professionals instead of untrained people on the (then rudimentary) internet.

People are generally quite stupid in short.

Someone I know reposted a post quoting a research study on social media yesterday, it all looked fairly legitimate and the link took you to a website called the public health policy journal. Scrolling through it it's ran by some scientists and doctors across various areas. The study had some obvious (to me) flaws, but if you're a complete novice at reading medical research you could easily be sucked in. The scientists and doctors are all known anti vaxxers/conspiracy theorists. Of course I spent time looking at the post so I've had a whole host of anti vax posts in my timelines today.

Unfortunately, I don't think it will right itself until we have large numbers of unvaccinated children dying from completely preventable diseases.

Yes and I think it will get worse with Kennedy. But FWIW the state where I live requires full vaccination to be able to attend school. If you miss one of those required then you’re excluded from school. My children have had extra due to moving from the UK and the timings being off compared to when they’re required here. They were also required to have the varicella jab.

With the amount of immigrants coming into the country on a daily basis I think it’s more important than ever to have vaccines.

I believe they have a serious outbreak of measles in Texas now.

Yet you're the one taking notes.

No, thank you. I'm not really interested in finding out about anymore of your opinions.

It feels symptomatic of a wider problem that so many people feel they can't trust the people in power. A lot of that is entirely understandable given the behaviour of many of them, but once the trust is gone then it makes it easy for even more untrustworthy sorts to plant their seeds of harm.

Perhaps you might want to start a bingo card?

Anti-vax and anti-abortion? Who could've guessed.

I'm anti-vax.

What baffles me most about pro-vax people is how little thought they put into the decision to vaccinate their children.

Edit to add:
I'm anti-vax for my own children, I don't care if other people vaccinate.