Parents choosing not to vaccinate their children

Everyone should have free choice. If you & your kids are vaccinated then it’s no skin off your nose, why get in such a knicker twist about something that absolutely won’t affect you - because you are vaccinated.

and even if your child gets something you can't prevent such as cancer as my son did last year and thankfully, he is doing well now. As a parent, you still somehow find a way to blame yourself and be convinced that you could've prevented it or got them diagnosed earlier.

I just can't fathom putting my child in danger when it's preventable. I'd never forgive myself. As you said, it's bad enough when it isn't preventable.

Someone always brings up the vitamin A crap I've noticed on SM. So many thick twats kids ended up in hospital with vitamin A toxicity not so long back. 🙄

"We" certainly did not all survive it!
MIL recalled children dying in the 30s and 40s when she was a child. A distant cousin died of measles and the extended family went to see the child laid out (think that might have been s Catholic thing?) Anyway, another small cousin was instructed to kiss the dead child. That child contracted measles by doing this, and also died! Horrific.

I believe you're likely correct. However, many vulnerable families chose not to vaccinate their children, even when they brought them to the GP. Negative experiences with public services or difficult life circumstances can heighten a person's vulnerability to misinformation and propaganda.

Fair enough, I’m sure your super secret legal case is exactly as you’ve described. 👍

I haven’t read all the posts just the first page but @SheepInMyShed has summed it up pretty nicely.

Im from & in Liverpool & no one I know is anti vax. From my kids in school when they’ve had vaccinations there’s one or two kids in each class who hasn’t been sent for their vax.
I’m very pro vax and the kids had their Covid jabs when they first came out.

However I do think trust is a major issue for communities left behind (for various reasons) & the vaccines appear to “come from the government” and after 15 years of austerity and our city being stripped off funding (stripped more harshly than more affluent places- it’s in the top spot for council funding being taken whilst also being in the top five of places of deprivation) it’s obvious why families don’t trust what “the government” tell them.

So trust needs to be rebuilt, education needs improving, plenty of opportunities provided to get vax and maybe even yes people need motivating; no vax no school. However, in practice this will mean kids will be missing vax and school. Just like many of the care home staff walked when they were forced into covid jabs.

Measles is one of the contagious human diseases,it has been around decades and we all survived

It seems the ant vaxxers are comparing measles with covid. Covid is imo responsible for the explosion of anti Vax sentiment. Partly because it transpired that most people didn't get too ill when they got covid and partly because, unlike some vaccines, the covid Vax didn't stop you getting it, just made it milder.

Measles is very different from other common childhood illnesses like chicken pox. Serious complications in chicken pox are rare. Measles makes most children quite poorly and even without hospitalisation can leave long term damage such as deafness. So those of us who had it before vaccination was available, we didn't "all survive" it unharmed.

The spectrum of antivaxx opinion does feel like a social contagion. Ironically.

I had measles as a baby, a few weeks before I was due to have the vaccination. So it’s always scary when posters talk about how much more ‘comfortable’ they would ‘feel’ if vaccinations were delayed, by an unnamed number of weeks or months, according to zero evidence. So that more children could die?

It perhaps helps that I grew up on a steady diet of Victorian and early 20th century children’s books. It is truly incredible how many of those books involve children being ill, dying and a constant drumbeat of tension about ‘wasted time’. Childhood disease was simply known to be likely to take anything up to ALL your children. At least half was quite normal. And they spent weeks and months being ill.

I do listen to experts, because if it were up to me I would happily have given ds every jab in the book before leaving hospital after his birth. I’ve paid to have vaccinations that weren’t on the schedule as well. Experts have determined that it is probably better to do the schedule of vaccinations for babies relatively late, when they’re a few weeks or months old, so I bowed to their well-considered recommendations.

Having actually nursed a child who died of measels and been the one to take them to the mortuary many years ago.
My opinion on this is pretty black and white.
This illness ( and many others) can maim and kill. It is also PREVENTABLE with immunisation.
There is little you can say to a parent when a child dies due to something they had the opportunity to prevent. It's not like a tragic accident, they sadly happen with children, it's not like cancer, cruel but again nothing a parent could have done to prevent.
With measles they had the option to give the child protection provided free by the government but declined so yes it is the parents fault that child died. And boy is that guilt hard to live with!

I would back rules that children should be fully immunised to attend nurseries and schools in this country.
We have many fools in this country who thinks doing research is a quick Google looking at often foreign conspiracy sites, tic toc etc.
They have no idea what peer reviewed scientific based research is or how to access it and understand it.
The NHS does have information available which is readerble and easily understood though.

Of course we didn’t “all survive it” 🤯

Yes and they don’t give a crap if your child can’t have the vaccinations due to severe reactions! The control the government have in Australia is scary! My child nearly died after his 12 months vaccs and stopped being able to speak within hours of having them. He has autism but the autism symptoms were made way worse by the vaccines. The specialists we saw know that children with autism have a thinner brain barrier that protects the brain from damage and makes them more susceptible to side effects but in Australia it’s all or nothing. They also give vaccines to babies just because a small group of ethnic minorities are prone to but they don’t want to just give the small group the vaccines so everyone suffers.

@BoredZelda my child is fully vaccinated.

That doesn't prevent me appreciating there are barriers in the way of other people accessing vaccinations for their children. Mostly boring, but surmountable ones.

Why quotation marks around expert? Do you think they’re making it up?

Not unheard of, but not common enough that it could account for a 15% reduction in people vaccinating their children.

I have no time for anti-vaxxers, and agree that unvaccinated children should not be allowed in schools, nor unvaccinated people of any age in hospitals. The selfishness and stupidity is astounding.

Unvaccinated people are not just in danger themselves: they are disease vectors and the more disease vectors you have, the more a disease can circulate. The more it circulates the higher the risk of mutation which would render the vaccine less effective, possibly useless, so the vaccinated are then also compromised.

And let's not forget that there are people who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons or who have lost their previous immunities due to medical reasons or for whom the vaccine hasn't taken (because no vaccine has 100% efficacy).
The more the disease circulates amongst the willfully unvaccinated, the more likely it is they will infect one of these people, too.This is the selfishness inherent in vaccine resistance and vaccine refusal.

Take your choice not to be vaccinated but accept that a side effect of this choice will be restrictions placed on your ability to access specific venues and events.

Here’s where this whole thing becomes ridiculous. Nowhere in the (now wholly debunked) Wakefield study, was it suggested single vaccines would eliminate the (non existent) risk of autism. This little nugget was given to the media by (shock horror) a doctor from a private clinic who just happened to offer vaccines at £100 a pop.

It not unheard for babies not be registered at the GP or they haven't had any contact with health visitor. I remember a case where a baby hadn't been register at the GP for two years - I assume the GP received the notification the lady had given birth. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a safety net for vulnerable families. Issues are often come to light when the children start school etc

I had measles as a child in the 60s before I got vaccinated. I remember being very ill in a dark room. It's why I wear hearing aids.

I had school friends who'd had polio, no one's even heard of polio now but it wasn't uncommon in the 60s. Children left wearing iron bars (calipers) on their legs.
DS1 was born in 1996 and DS2 in 98 at the height of the autism speculation. It was quite a tough decision giving them both MMR. Had social media been around then I wonder how much harder it would have been.

I do agree that there should be restricted access to nursery / education for anti Vax families.

So 17 deaths out of 8 million vaccinations. Would anyone sane bet on a horse with a 17 to 8 billion chance of winning? - I think not.

The sort of scaremongering we see about vaccines is what causes deaths, not the vaccines.

Was there any explanation offered for the lower uptake in the city?

You can’t have it separately - at least one is no longer manufactured.

Common sense public policy. Hopefully the UK will catch up sooner rather than later.

My daughter developed a dairy intolerance after an infection. It’s quite common.

Seems unusual that people would suggest reducing the number of vaccines given in one dose, if access to a GP appointment is the problem.

Many vaccines are given in schools, what’s the excuse there? The first vaccines are given at 8, 12 and 16 weeks, how many mothers aren’t on mat leave at this point? These barriers seem to be more about low income families, so the baby likely isn’t in nursery, who is looking after them if both parents are at work? I can’t understand anyone saying they didn’t know. The NHS has automated systems that send letters out for vaccine reminders.

If families are struggling to get their babies vaccinated because of a lack of GP access, this means you have families of babies who are not regularly being seen by the healthcare teams - health visitors, GP check ups, weight clinics etc. That’s a bigger issue if that’s happening.

The only point here that makes sense is that you can’t check your child’s status. That should be something you can look up and find easily. I went for every vaccine but couldn’t be certain of what my daughter had been vaccinated against.