Parents choosing not to vaccinate their children

My children have had all their vaccines but I didn't follow the nhs schedule as I was concerned about overloading. So i booked seperate appointments for each one. The GP surgery and vaccination staff were understanding. The way the NHS schedule is set up is about cost saving more than anything. People with concerns about overloading young children should know they can space them out.

This is exactly it, isnt it?

I am a skilled professional- in my field. If I am intelligent but I am not skilled in another field and if I want advise in a different area I would see another professional!

I live in the Midlands and we had an outbreak a year or so ago. Alongside children they were asking adults if a certain age to check their vaccine status. I am of the age where I was only given one dose. I queried it as I live with an adult who is immunosuppressed. I was in the following day being jabbed with another dose. They honestly weren't taking the risk. They said even despite the drive on social media, on the radio stations and in doctors surgeries they weren't getting a good enough uptake.

Yes I know. My oldest was a baby around that time, and there was so much fear around vaccines.

Mine are all vaccinated. I was not as I was a sickly child and my gp didn’t advise it.

At that time antivaxxers were treated badly. Had they been presented with clear and easy to understand evidence, which surely must have been available, it all could have gone away.
Andrew Wakefield went on to still present his evidence, in his Vaxxed film, in talks across many countries - if all his work was debunked clearly and transparently then there would be no room at all for his talks. Whatever action was taken sadly didn’t do the trick, but iirc it was an approach of “we’ve done the science, don’t worry, vaccines are safe” with a perceptible eye roll aimed at the “idiots” questioning it all. Yet at the same time Tony Blair refused to say whether his son Leo had received the MMR which fed the whole thing more.

It’s a mess, but sadly it’s not just a mess made by antivaxxers. Science has played a big role by treating people as idiots who cannot possibly understand, and not done their part by providing clear results and evidence, which has led many to believe that there is no evidence that vaccines are safe. It’s known human psychology that people become what you treat them as. They’re reaping what they’ve sown.

Obviously this is terrible for unvaccinated children. It’s fixable, but change needs to come from the top. They need to change their approach to this, particularly as their approach has contributed to it.

Absolutely - I don’t want to live in a communist country but if you want to endanger vulnerable groups you can do so on the fringes of society and home school.

Interestingly from the moment the first vaccine was introduced (for smallpox) there was anti vaxxers.

definitely not some covid thing.

children used to be not named until they had survived small pox because so many died from it.

I take advice from subject matter experts. If my dog needs treatment, we visit the vet. If a need legal advice, I see a lawyer. If my car isn’t working properly, I see the mechanic.
If I need a potentially life saving vaccine supported by doctors and virologists, I go and get the shot. I don’t listen to anti vaxxers or YouTube so called experts.

I think there are various factors at play and there needs to be multiple ways to tackle vaccination uptake. I know a fair few anti vaxers(I home ed), mostly they have distrust in the government and medicine as a whole, preferring natural remedies, these people have always existed, saying no access to school etc wouldn’t impact them.
Then you have people who are becoming more uncertain since COVID with the help of social media which like it or not many people are massively influenced by and get all of their information from and take things as facts. I’ve seen posts about Andrew Wakefield shared and the comments are full of people who just believe the post without doing any research of their own.
Then there are cultural reasons for not vaccinating , some areas have lower intake due to the cultural make up of the area. This was a thing in my area during covid and is also the same with childhood vaccinations.

I think the Government needs to take action and exclude unvaccinated children (excluding genuine medical reasons etc) from schools and nurseries. Why give free nursery hours to unvaccinated children. Some parents are not vaccinating due to information they see online, or like on here, worried about the 3 in 1. It’s madness.

How are you going to feel if your child is in the morgue because you took a decision not to vaccinate. That’s going to be very hard to live with. Do parents not realise how serious it can be. I hope that making this death public, parents in Liverpool will do the right thing and get the vaccine.

There are still threads now started about the MMR, on here. This was way way before Covid.

“It’s so incredibly frustrating that a century of work to eradicate these illnesses is now being reversed because science and medicine are suddenly seen as bad words.”

I don’t think they’re being seen as bad words as such, more that science and medicine can be very arrogant and inaccessible. It’s like a “I’m very clever and you’re not” approach. Which pushes people away.

How many nowadays, particularly women, are fobbed off at the drs? Medical misogyny is a big problem for many women. Medical gaslighting is rife. Most of us know what that feels like. Not being taken seriously makes us doubt everyone involved in our care.

For whatever reason not everyone is happy to believe the very basic info we’re given about vaccines, so many will go looking for their own and find other similarly scared people.

Those researching and developing vaccines have a responsibility to be accessible, transparent, and present their findings in ways that most people can understand, or at least have accessible documents alongside. This would prevent so many of the anti vaxx opinions, and would very easily and clearly debunk the anti vaxx documents and evidence that float around the internet. If they can’t/won’t do that then of course it leads people to believe that they’re hiding something.

The days of “I’m a scientist/doctor therefore you need to believe me” have long gone. These orgs need to adapt to the realities of this world.

That man has so much to answer for when he meets St Peter at the pearly gates. He seems to have become a celebrity in America, does speaking tours and such. No-one there seems to have any idea that his “research” was discredited to the point of him actually being struck off.

@Birdyfrom yellow fever vaccine is live, and known to cause side effects. Kids are not being offered Yellow fever as part of their schedule.

Why??
Don't you think if there were risks to vaccines being given at once they wouldn't do it? There are so many vaccine doubts that are nothing more than just people's uneducated instinct.

I agree to a point, that antiVax parents need to be seen by someone (? Community paed) to directly tackle their concerns, as is usually misinformation. But, we should also protect vulnerable too, and exclude those who choose to not vaccinate from nurseries and schools. some will only begrudgingly vaccinate their kids, that’s also fine.

DD is currently doing hospital placements in Liverpool and I can confirm what @MidnightPatrol is saying.

She attended a talk about the low take up of vaccines and screening in Liverpool relative to the rest of the country.

People are naive to illnesses that they haven’t seen during their lifetime for precisely that reason - they haven’t seen it. They have seen acute and self limiting childhood illnesses which are treated with ease or easily accessible meds from the GP, so they think all illnesses fall under this umbrella.

I had a colleague who said she didn’t vaccinate because she believed building their own immunity, I didn’t bother explaining that’s what a vaccine does. Because you can’t build immunity without exposure and what she’s saying is she wants to take her chances with hospitalisation.

Another thing that pisses me off is the egotistical anti-vaxers who present at hospital wanting treatment. If they’re against modern medicine why do they go there when their plan back fires?

Your key question is what can we do to encourage and support. Going to war and exclusions will harden some adults position, and its the children who suffer.

The denial of medicine and science will be the downfall of civilization. And I don't think that's as hyperbolic as it sounds.

It’s common to feel ill after a yellow fever jab. You know what makes you REALLY ill though? Not getting the jab and catching yellow fever.

i agree, I’m pro vaccine, but it’s the amount given all at once which concerns me. Husband used to have to have vaccinations as part of his job, he was taken really ill after one set of them, the older experienced doctor who had to house visit said he thought it was a reaction to the yellow fever vaccination given in conjunction with the others, it overloaded his immune response. If it had this effect on a strong, healthy, full grown man, what might it do to a small, young baby. I was able to have the I had the measles vaccination singularly for dc, but that was many years ago. I think there are a lot of people who have this sensible concern

This is exactly it. People have no idea how awful most of these childhood illnesses were because we’ve grown up in a time and place where (due to the success of vaccinations) they’ve no longer been a threat.

You just have to look at the gravestones in an old churchyard to see how things used to be. Whole families of siblings dying within weeks of each other, etc.

Even now there are places in the world where people would think us absolutely insane to turn down the vaccinations we are lucky enough to have available.

It’s so incredibly frustrating that a century of work to eradicate these illnesses is now being reversed because science and medicine are suddenly seen as bad words.