I hate anti-vaxxers

I remember having measles when I was little (I'm an oldster). I was so unwell - hallucinating at one point, my fever was so high. I was looked after at home. I cannot imagine the impact on the NHS should there be a measles outbreak or, heaven forbid, an epidemic. We aren't used to coping with these horrendous diseases with really major symptoms at home - our medical facilities would be overwhelmed.

Vaccinating protects your own child from the diseases, and it protects babies who are too young for vaccines and kids who are too sick to have them.

Newborns can and do die from whooping cough and people of any age can be killed or left disabled by measles. So getting your kids vaccinated is the logical thing for every parent to do, assuming you’re someone who would rather not accidentally kill a small baby.

This is a good explainer

And this is a good website for more info, it goes into a lot more detail than the NHS site. https://vaccineknowledge.ox.ac.uk

Except for vaccinations yes - however for vaccinations - its everyones concern.

They are because they affect other people.
Anti vaxxers like other conspiracy theory influencers are dangerous.

Different causes of low vaccine acceptance need managing in different ways.

In my area, there was success at Covid vaccine pop-up clinics at places of worship to directly work with communities with low vaccination rates. It made access easier (travel) and enabled people to discuss their concerns and be reassured especially if there were language or cultural concerns.

People who are actually "anti-vaxx" are difficult because it tends to be accompanied by mistrust of authority. I'm not convinced that denying access to childcare and state education is the solution because it then further isolates people from mainstream society and education with critical thinking. By secondary school, pupils are usually deemed to be Gillick Competent and have the choice to override their parents' choices. Long term, access to education is more likely to result in better engagement with the next generation rather than trapping them in echo chambers.

The Andrew Wakefield fans boggle my mind. He's doing what they accuse "big pharma" of doing.

I'm pre-MMR. I had mumps and rubella in childhood. Fotunately not seriously but it was a couple of weeks off school at a time. Fortunately I dodged measles prior to a vaccination in my teen years as an epidemic was expected locally. Rubella jabs were also given to teenage girls at the time.

The big problem is society forgetting how nasty these illnesses can be because vaccination was so effective at making them obscure.

We don't have polio etc in this country because enough people give the vaccinations to their children to result in herd immunity. Photos of children in iron lungs make us realise how important vaccinations are.
I'd love to have the Covid vaccination again, but the last 2 affected my heart so the dr agrees i shouldn't have it. Others who can have it - please do. There are probably a number of us who are unprotected, and herd immunity might keep us alive and well.

Immigration doesn’t help but no your right a lot of unvaccinated children are British as you say. But it’s not white British who caused the outbreak in Birmingham and Coventry. This is now under control largely due to efforts of religious leaders and nhs pop up vaccine provision but is starting to spike in Leicester now.

It is partly an issue with pork gelatine and not knowing there’s alternatives available. Also an issue with access to services. I am not sure here whether this is lack of nhs provision in these poorer non white areas, language barriers or lack of engagement or something else. But it’s not the classic new age anti vaxxer people are talking about. It seems to be a more complex problem and until we properly figure out the barriers these people are encountering then it won’t be fixed.

Not this again. You do realise people cough for reasons other than Covid? I'm coughing pretty much continuously at the moment - it's hay fever. Am I meant to stay indoors until it goes? I remember being told on here in 2020 that I should stay at home in case I scared someone. I really thought we'd moved on from that.

Quite agree with you. If I was to say I feel off my bike as a child not wearing a cycling helmet and was completely fine, so I'm now on a lifelong mission to put people off wearing helmets because in my experience alone they had no benefit people would think I was mad.

No we do not. I remember a child in my class at school who had her legs in calipers due to polio. Perhaps modern generations have forgotten these things, we need to keep reminding them.

@INeedCoffee2021 fair enough as long as you prepared to homeschool your kids and keep them away from ours!

Maybe we need to refame how we talk to anti-vaxxers to make it seem less "cool". Anyone who is anti-vax is by definition pro-disease.

So you contracted measles, rubella and chickenpox and recovered with no long-term effects, so you think that this is the same for everyone? What if a baby with an undeveloped immune system contracted measles, an illness that used to kill small children in the past?

What if you had contracted rubella when pregnant? There is a high likelihood that your baby would be affected and be born with severe disabilities.

High vaccine take up leads to herd immunity so that people who can't take the vaccine, including small babies, are protected.

The polio and small pox vaccines eradicated those diseases in this country. That was a huge achievement that is currently in jeopardy due to the anti-vax movement. What they are doing is much worse that someone referring to them as 'morons' online.

That is a load of shit. I have had many a conversation with people in real life and people of sound mind agree that parents that don't vaccinate(unless there is a medical reason) are the most selfish and idiotic.

Fucking 'feelies' what an ignorant uniformed comment.

As someone who knows children who have died or been severely and permanently disabled recently by childhood illnesses which could and should have been irradicated if everyone were vaccinated I would call anyone who decides to not to vaccinate selfish in the extreme (putting your own ill informed views ahead of your own child's wellbeing, not even considering how you may impact others who have no choice). It is happening now, not in the past which the ignorant and ill-informed seem to ignore as a reason to vaccinate as it was in the past and so wont affect them.

The unique cleverness and superiority 'feelies' that anti-vaxxers get from deciding not to vaccinate is simply incomprehensible.

Exactly. And the death and serious illness statistics demonstrated that to be true.

Neglect is a word that can be manipulated.

Anti-vaxxers are self centred fools who without critical thinking, the ability to understand that they don't live on an island all on their own and an inability to look at scientific evidence or history.

They'd have been shouting 'burn the witches' three centuries ago with the same inability to assess evidence or consider the impact of their actions on others.

However sometimes they are not the same, for example not making the chickenpox vaccine available on the NHS means that some individuals may suffer badly from the virus (and a small number die) but it does mean that the chickenpox virus is still in circulation meaning that there are less severe reactions from older people to shingles

What on earth are you talking about, @1dayatatime? You can't get shingles unless you have had chickenpox. Therefore preventing chickenpox prevents shingles. Having had chickenpox as a child and shingles fairly recently, I can confidently state that shingles was bloody severe, having left me with permanent damage to my eye.

They are if they spread infection.

No one ever claimed it would stop transmission!
we where told it would mean less chance of becoming seriously ill with it

Can I just add that this isn’t just an unvaccinated people from “overseas” thing in London. It’s also unvaccinated British people. I know lots of people from the shire counties who are unvaccinated & come into London.
II can’t help but feel being antivax is an indirect way of someone saying “fuck you” to me & my friends & family. I understand there are risks with vaccinations but I have a responsibility to community to take that risk. I risk my life on a daily basis in many other ways, like getting in a car, using household cleaning products, breathing in polluted air.

What did they say about puberty blockers and cross sex hormones for children in 2018?

We could see what happened to the stats of, in particular, deaths from covid as soon as the vaccine was widely available. Death and serious illness numbers literally plummeted from what had been pretty horrifying heights.

Wrong. I remember a tiny minority of militant antivaxxers in the 1990s when my children were little and my friends and I very much did care. They could make that choice for their kids safe in the knowledge that the rest of us were vaccinating our kids so herd immunity would be high enough to keep their kids safe. We were happy to see our own children protected and to keep herd immunity for those who couldn't be immunised for medical reasons or were too young, but we were taking the slight risk that our children would be the rare unlucky ones to have vaccine damage. The antivaxxers now are taking much more of a risk and some of their children will pay a terrible price. So will some kids who can't be immunised. It's criminally stupid and selfish.