I hate anti-vaxxers

@TaggieO I never claimed to be anti-vax fyi, I have explained why I have ceased vaccinations for now.

For the illnesses we routinely vaccinate against, I don’t feel it’s a risk worth taking.

If a new deadlier disease emerged and became rampant, then there’s a chance I would reconsider.

For what it’s worth, I’m also one of those people who would rather excercise more, eat well etc. I have 3 kids - thankfully 1 has had calpol once, 2 have had antibiotics once each - eldest is 13. We really only go to the doctors if the situation really warrants it.

Ebola is a terrible disease @TaggieO . Yes I wonder how many people would refuse an Ebola vaccine , should one become available. Few enough I'd imagine. Even if RFKjr went there to spread misinformation as he did in Samoa.

People seem more comfortable with treatment, especially oral , eg with antibiotics, than with vaccines? But then we don't like it when the GP says ' exercise more and eat a bit less , you'll be grand ' . We'd rather she prescribed some tablet perhaps.

So you haven't got any sources to support what you are saying; no credible ones anyway. And you will never convince me against vaccination. Nobody is claiming that vaccination is absolutely 100% risk free (what in life is?), just that for the vast majority of people the risks of serious side effects are tiny and far outweighed by the risks of contracting the diseases themselves.

You state that your older family members caught these diseases without complications, as an argument that they were not serious - the same can be stated about vaccination, that in the majority of cases there are no complications. Why do you think it is OK to run one risk but not the other, statistically far smaller, risk?

Then you go on to state that 2 cases of rubella in pregnancy had 'not very good outcomes sadly', yet your answer is to allow everyone to catch it despite the fact that this would put other pregnant womens' babies at risk?!! You say that we are all trying to do our best and that 'no mother wants harm to come to their child' yet you advocate directly putting other mothers' children at risk by letting rubella do its worst?

You have your personal and family experience, I have my own. I am old enough to have been a child in the 1960s when many of the vaccinations were being rolled out. One thing that is striking is that of my remaining early childhood memories, many of them are about the vaccines and immunisations I & my siblings, cousins & friends had as children, what i was told about them, what they were for, having the vaccinations themselves. It must have been talked about a lot by the adults around us, for me to pick up on it the way I did. That is probably very revealing in itself about how seriously they were taken at the time & what a boon they were.

I was told of 2 cases involving rubella in pregnancy with not great outcomes sadly, but I can also see how rubella is a mild illness in itself and it would be better to allow everyone to catch it and develop naturally immunity.

Why do you think the rubella vaccine was developed in the first place? Because allowing everyone to catch it and develop naturally immunity was not working! Babies were born with preventable congenital defects because their mothers contracted rubella during pregnancy.

I was immunised against rubella at secondary school, even though I had already had it. But immunising just girls at 13 was still harming unborn babies as many girls slipped through the net, and the virus still spread among boys, exposing these unvaccinated women. Which is why all children are now immunised against rubella well before puberty.

That's interesting research about "measles amnesia" - essentially the measles virus affects the memory cells of the immune system - but it does produce immunity to measles afterwards.

However, you are at much more increased risk of developing other diseases as your immunity has been wiped out

"Scientists have known for decades that even after they recover, children who have been infected with measles are significantly more likely to fall ill and die from other causes. In fact, a study from 1995 found that vaccinating against the virus reduces the overall likelihood of death by between 30% and 86% in the years afterwards."

You mean "measles and immune amnesia"

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211112-the-people-with-immune-amnesia

Enter "immune amnesia", a mysterious phenomenon that's been with us for millennia, though it was only discovered in 2012. Essentially, when you're infected with measles, your immune system abruptly forgets every pathogen it's ever encountered before – every cold, every bout of flu, every exposure to bacteria or viruses in the environment, every vaccination. The loss is near-total and permanent. Once the measles infection is over, current evidence suggests that your body has to re-learn what's good and what's bad almost from scratch.

I never knew that.

Being vaccinated does carry a risk of reaction to the vaccines.with some potentially rare bur serious consequences.

Being unvaccinated - and having a population that is also unvaccinated - carries a risk of disease with serious consequences.The risk might well be greater to people in certain medical groups or ages.

Either way, there's a risk - but the risk from being unvaccinated is normally much greater than the risk from being vaccinated.

And as harsh as it sounds, someone who did get iseriously ill from vaccine damage would probably have been much much more likely to have got seriously ill or even die if they had been unvaccinated and then developed a disease.

All parents screw up; some in big ways and some in little ways. It's a shame that they have to carry guilt, but maybe they would simply feel like they should speak out in anti vax groups to try to prevent others making the same mistake.

. It really bloody annoys me reading that trope above. . " If your kid was dead / damaged from measles)" stating that it's easily preventable.

How the hell do you imagine my parents would feel if they kept being told they could've prevented the measles that left me partially deaf? ?

The spread of covid has already shown that there is absolutely not the control measures in place to stop a pandemic before it kills millions of people, and Covid was a walk in the park compared to the Spanish flu. You keep blathering on about sanitation measures - I’m not sure you know what that means. The developed world has had electricity and running water and sewage systems for over 100 years. The importance of hand hygiene was discovered in the 19th century. None of these are new ideas and people have continued to die en masse since their introduction. To definitely prevent the transmission of a virus, you would need to wash your hands every single time they came into contact with ANYTHING. Please do tell me how you feel it’s practical to introduce that in modern society.

Ebola has a death rate of 50% to 90%. There is currently no cure. It’s being kept at bay by the fact that outbreaks sp far have been in rural and impoverished areas so there’s little travel to and from affected regions. If that does get out, we will likely see a vaccine before a cure. Are you telling me that you’d prefer your children die writhing in pain and bleeding from their eyes, ears and mouths as the virus dissolves their organs like acid rather than protect them from it with the vaccine? Let me repeat - UP TO NINETY PERCENT FATALITIES.

I'm a dr. Pretty much all the staff at my hospital (so thousands of people) had COVID vaccinations, and most of them had flu vaccine as well, as that's always been a thing in the NHS for decades. No staff member suffered any complications, although when the first COVID vaccinations came out, there were a few people who seemed to develop fever and all over body aches and feeling terrible for 24hrs afterwards, but this wasn't COVID. None of my colleagues have flu every year. I've met people who claim to have flu when they just have a rotten cold, but there are loads of other respiratory viruses that make people ill.

"Plus why are vaccines the only drugs we cannot sue manufacturers for if they go wrong or if there is negligence?"

You are completely wrong on this point.

I think people who decide not to immunise their DC, should not get access to nurseries, schools, libraries, hospitals etc but should also pay higher tax as there is a fiscal element to their stupid decisions.
They put pressure on the NHS plus the people infected may need long term support.

@RafaistheKingofClay what a crock of shit you are sprouting.

Happy to say I am wrong if you can produce peer reviewed evidence and data that proves your 'theory'

Agree! Kids without routine vaccinations shouldn't be allowed to join state schools.

Sorry but you don't understand a needle phobia.

I have a friend with a needle phobia, I have been with her to support her having blood tests.

The phlebotomists always say, "Oh you will be fine with me it won't hurt".

Then my friend sits in the chair, starts sweating, her blood sugar drops and suddenly she is cold and shivering.

She ends up covered in silver blankets with a fan on her. They won't let her leave until her BP is normal.

When she had to have an operation the hospital staff let me go with her as far as the anaesthetic room where she 'went under' sobbing in to my chest.

I have a good friend, smart, well educated, professional guy. Left wing. His baby niece received her vaccinations. It was later discovered that she had a number of serious health conditions. She lived for a few extremely difficult years before sadly passing away just before COVID.

He became convinced that vaccines were responsible for everything and developed a deep-seated mistrust of mainstream medical advice. The pandemic was obviously very difficult for him. He was never combative with it, but he would occasionally share anti-vax stuff on social media, or get into long debates.

It was heartbreaking, because you could see that it came from a place of genuine good intentions; he just didn't want anyone else to suffer the pain that his family had been through, and he couldn't fathom why people were dismissing him or treating him like a nutter. In his mind, he wasn't some terminally online weirdo who'd 'done his research' on YouTube; he was a guy it had actually happened to.

I'm so opposed to anti-vax, we agreed never to discuss it for the sake of our friendship. But I totally and completely understand how his experience put him on that path, and I don't think less of him for it.

The social media anti-vax movement though, I treat with total distain. I have a pretty wide international circle on my SM due to work, hobbies, friends and family. Across such a broad spectrum, it was only ever the thickest, most uneducated, unsuccessful people I knew peddling it, and they were all selling the exact same lies.

I don't believe in coincidences of that size.

You can’t even find just one source?

And if the world worked as you envision, far less children would make it to adulthood.

Crikey, this is genuinely one of the most unintelligent views I’ve come across. So your only concern is yourself and your family but you’re relying on other people being vaccinated to protect you and your family? I would welcome your thoughts behind that reasoning!

I'd expect nothing less from an anti-vaxxer.

Our kids are keeping your kids safe.

What a load of BS. I am old enough that I have had whooping cough, German measles, measles, mumps, chickenpox, even scarlet fever. They were horrible.

My aunt had polio as a child. The first time she walked without callipers was down the aisle at her wedding.

Anyone who doesn’t vaccine their kids is incredibly foolhardy. None of this “let’s just support the body once you’ve caught it”. That didn’t work very well for eradicating polio or smallpox or TB.

No, we recognise that everything carries a risk but the risk of not doing something can be greater than the risk of doing it, as in the case of vaccines.

Babies get some protection from their mother's immunity and breastfeeding, but it's not even close to a failsafe.

and in all honesty, we wouldn’t be here today if it was as deadly as they make out it is now

Do a few family trees and see how many mothers lost multiple children to measles and you'll see how deadly it is.

My Gr-Granny had 3 surviving children. That's how we're here today in my family.

She lost nine - 7 to measles and 2 to TB. Four of the children she lost to measles died within a week of each other.

I'm 110% pro-vaxx. But what about bodily autonomy?

Something I noticed recently after trips to Birmingham for hospital appointments for DD - there are no posters advertising the gelatine free MMR.

Where I live up near the Scotland/england border there are posters in the Drs surgery and hospitals really promoting that there is that option.