I hate anti-vaxxers

It’s a tricky one
Other people have the right to do what they see fit for their children. The R part of the MMR made my dd dangerously ill. My kids all caught natural measles and the first one who got it contracted from a vaccinated child who had been abroad. They were very unwell but got over it, it was similar to chickenpox ime. Public Health England were very reassuring that the vast majority of healthy kids have no real ill effects from measles (I was surprised about that given what we’re told about it)
i do feel fir you though, I wouldn’t want my little baby to get it (or any other childhood illness) when they are little.
Not giving my kids the MMR doesn’t make me a bad person- I’m not going to sacrifice my children’s health for other peoples kids to be protected. Not when my own child was so very ill after the jab. People are very stupid though when it comes to this subject- my GP surgery still moans there’s a spike in measles and therefore I should give my kids MMR… even though they’ve had actual measles

There was the notorious case of Princess Alice (one of Queen Victoria's daughters) in the 1870s. Every single member of her family caught this highly contagious disease, and Alice and her daughter died.

Smallpox

The infectiousness period occurs when the lesions are heaviest. There are five known classifications of smallpox. The ordinary form is the most common (~90 percent) with a 30 percent case fatality rate. The flat form accounts for about 5 percent of cases, and has a 97 percent case fatality rate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK221063/

Eliminated by, oh yes, vaccines.

50% was a rough average I took. (their bolding, but read the sentence after).
They are at least working on a vaccine for the bubonic plague, which killed an estimated 30 - 60% of the population at the time.

Just how, exactly, do you 'plan to support the body through' smallpox or worse bubonic plague when between 30 - 90% of the people who get it die? Never mind the percentage who actually get sick, which is going to be higher?

Plus as many people who are actually trained and studied this have said, we are going to get more pandemics not less.

This information is very easily available. But others have said all this many times upthread, so no doubt it will slide off your hide like water off oilskins.

My mum had it when she was 5s. She spent 6 weeks in hospital with no visits from family or friends. Her parents could visit and look through a window.

Someone gave my mum one of those cut out paper dolls where you cut out different clothes.

They were not allowed out of bed so the older girls did the cutting out and then put the 'doll' in between the pages of a book and threw the book bed to bed.

Yes, they blindly follow their uneducated friends and never see the irony in calling anyone who doesn’t agree “sheep” 😂

They should have vaccination mandatory to attend school .

Vaccination mandatory to receive child benefit or any other benefits.

This!

Shingles is really painful. I wish I'd been in a position to have the kids get chicken pox vaccine.

What the hell are you talking about? Which disease has a 50% death rate please?

It's people like you who.need protection from herd immunity.

@BlackeyedSusan Im sure a lot of it comes down to the basic human need to be safe with a big dose among some of wanting to be different and edgy.

But the lack of any sort of intelligent thinking is genuinely frightening. I don’t think the answer is to try and stop these viruses artificially, but to understand them and support the body through them, because if you really understand the laws of nature, you will know you can’t. when you're talking about diseases with a 50% death rate really make me think that there should be a test before people are allowed to vote or procreate :P

Dh Aunty had diptheria as a 3 year old, was in quatantine away from family for weeks on end and her heart was damaged. She lived until her 60s but with life long effects from a now preventable disease.

My kids showed signs of autism before their MMRs. I'm autistic and too old for MMR.

My dad was probably autistic , before any measles vaccines.

However, it is really hard to counteract that element of doubt once it creeps in. It would be helpful to look at the consequences of not vaccinating compared to having the vaccine. It's all about risk.

I already wrote about my MIL up thread. She had polio as a child because the vaccine only became available while she was in hospital a matter of weeks after she got it. She lost friends to it, and has spent her entire life paralysed in one leg as a result. She has never been able to do so many things that we all take for granted - day at the beach, swimming, cycling, a walk in the country, riding, football etc. Even going upstairs. She has severe osteoporosis from the lack of exercise, falls over and breaks bones very regularly. She missed about 2 years of her education in recovering from it and never caught up, so her life opportunities have been further restricted. My husband has had to care for her from being a very young child himself. (On a lighter note, this does mean he is very domesticated and does his share round the house!).

The impact of diseases is so much greater than death.

@Holluschickie I worked with a Nigerian woman who was paralyzed by polio. It ruined her life in a number of ways, not least that she couldn't marry and have children and was sidelined.

Apparently Bin Laden was tracked down partly using a fake polio vaccination team. The damage that will have done to people's trust in the vaccination program is incalcuable.

It's not any of your business, or mine, if others' choices don't impact on you (or me).

You don't live on an island though. Everyone in society is part of that society. They benefit from education, streets, electricity and yes, health care systems. You can't just say that not taking a vaccine doesn't affect anyone else because the fact, the cold hard fact, is that it does.

If you don't want to live in a tribe, then your decision has no impact on anyone else. (Of course, you might not be able to get a vaccine then because they only exist because we had enough reserves in the societal system that people could put time and attention into developing them.)

This over individualism is both worrying and in a black way amusing. Anti-vaxxers think their choice only affects them. It doesn't; like almost everyone they are desperately dependent on society, as proven by the fact they're posting on the internet at all. The level of unawareness is ironic.

I spend a lot of time in India as I have family there. India eliminated polio in 2011, after a huge house to house education campaign. Parents in remote villages walk and continue to walk hours to get vaccines. So do rural doctors. I used to see older polio victims in the past. These days, I rarely do.

Anti-vaxxers are often privileged Westerners like RFK.

I was in the military when I was younger, several decades ago now. One of the training exercises I participated in involved providing vaccination programmes to remote villages in Kenya. We couldn't get to all villages, so would set up in a central location. Local people would then send runners (literally) to distant villages and over the next couple of days, parents would appear with their children from all directions, having walked for hours and hours with multiple little ones, in order to get them vaccinated.

They understood the life saving importance. No need for internet 'research'. They had seen the effects of not vaccinating first hand and had a far better grasp of the concept of benefit:risk evaluation than any privileged anti-vaxxer.

I'm not an anti-vaxer. I still don't think it's any of my business what medical choices others make though. There needs to be more education around vaccinations and people need to be presented with all the information to make an informed decision, including the risks, otherwise we end up with a lot of people not trusting the government and/or going off and doing their own research which can be inaccurate.

Indeed. It is that group I am talking about.

I also dislike the continued slander of science/scientists/doctors/any university-educated professional by them.

'asinine' is the right word.

When you have the very rare rare cases where there -is- a reaction to the vaccine or there are reasons not to give it, that's a different case. But the anti-vaxxers seem characterized by the poor thinking, the huge assumption that They Know Best based on a gaping lack of any real knowledge, and the deliberate conscious refusal to consider the reality of what a world with unchecked diseases is actually like.

I wonder if @AnxiousOCDMumhas ever taken a walk around an old cemetery and read some headstones from before the vaccine age. I know it is almost a cliche now, but it is a heartbreakingly true one: so, so many children and babies buried in their infancy, sometimes more than one in the same family just a few weeks apart.

And it was normal. There was no debate to be had about ‘do we give our precious children this medicine that will keep them catching this disease and alive, or are we concerned about something nebulous?’ They caught it, and either lived, or not. That’s it.

I find the attitude of anti-vaxxers to be generally a quite entitled, Western-centric one. It is only in our affluent societies (by comparison) that we have the luxury of having such a asinine debate.

A link that seems quite timely, a news article from just today. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98jng7j1llo

The level of distorted and dishonest thinking from @AnxiousOCDMum is frightening. Quoting only deaths from measles and ignoring the awful other consequences; pretending the thread is only about measles; ignoring the fact that while there can very occasionally be consequences from vaccines, there are more from not having them.

I think the line

I don’t think the answer is to try and stop these viruses artificially, but to understand them and support the body through them, because if you really understand the laws of nature, you will know you can’t.

Is the most stupid line I have read on Mumsnet ever. That's the situation we were in before vaccines, where people just got sick and often (eg with smallpox, spanish flu) died in their millions and millions more were negatively impacted by disability or loss of their family members.

You’re assuming I haven’t read this and where I’ve got my info from.

Me citing the statistics regarding the % of deaths is in direct response to the data provided by a PP.

I think at this point we are all going to have to just move on now. Exhausting.

Then use the one in table provided. 0.2%.