Genuine question for anti-vaxxers

Also I'm nit sure what you mean about the NHS delayed introducing varicella tax because of antivax propaganda. That's untrue. This is taken from the Uni of Cambridge website and explains why it wasn't introduced before
"New modelling research has concluded that the protection from exogenous boosting is likely to last a maximum of 5 years, though this is significantly less than previous estimates. This was applied to a model of varicella vaccination in England with new estimates of quality of life loss due to chickenpox. It was found that the increase in costs and quality of life lost due to the increase in shingles cases was less then the costs and quality of life loss saved by the reduction in chickenpox cases. Therefore, the vaccination programme is cost effective."

I have made up my mind! It's not an all or nothing. My kids have had everything offered and some extras I've paid for except covid. I was responding to a PP who implied it was irresponsible to not tax kids against covid because they could be spreading it "exponentially"
I can though, understand (without agreeing) where anti vax views are coming from.

But that was the entire stated point of why children were offered the vaccine last and the NHS didn’t much care if they had it or not, plus why they and healthy younger people don’t get offered it any more, surely you realise that?

And, as I said above, the NHS has been trying to introduce varicella into the vaccine programme for years, and the only reason they haven’t already is precisely because of the antivax propaganda. Make up your mind! Do you want vaccines or not? 🤷‍♀️

This seems pretty sensible and is clearly not AV logic

Also, frankly, my child is not being used as a shield for other people! Covid is the only vaccine I didnt give them. Because for young people the risks are higher than for older people and because their personal risk of the virus is tiny (they'd already had it by the time they were offered a vax)
It's the same reasoning I used when I paid for their CP vaccines. I'm nit using them as boosters for others!
I'm happy for the most part to give my kids vaccines to contribute to herd immunity as long as it benefits them as well. Otherwise no way!

Why don’t you explain why this is naive? Do you think anti-vaccination propaganda is somehow not naive?

I’m in the lucky position of having the qualifications to understand a lot of this data, which is not the case for everyone: but let’s think logically. What do you believe: that hundreds of thousands of doctors and scientists around the globe for the last century are conspiring to hide data on vaccine safety? If so, where is it? Where have they put it? Who has hidden it? What would be the point?

What makes you think there are some other, better data sets out there? Do anti-vaccination campaigners provide it? Where can I view it? Who has it, how did they get it, and why should I trust them more than the hundreds of thousands of people working in this field? What’s the point of having a massive regulatory regime around medical safety if it’s all just some kind of sham?

This has been an interesting thread and I feel I have gained some insight into the anti-vax position. I said very early in the thread that I felt the covid vaccine was partly responsible and I think that's been born out. We all had our polio and measles vaccines and never caught those diseases. Most of us had covid vaccines and most of us still caught it. It's very hard to measure whether it would have been worse without the vaccine or whether the mutation of the virus to a less potent form was the bigger factor in reducing the mortality rate.

I can understand the theory that there is zero risk of vaccine damage if you don't have any vaccines. A dismissal of the serious nature of some once common but now forgotten diseases because they simply don't have any first hand knowledge of these illnesses. They do also seem to be shamelessly relying on herd immunity to protect their children, this and a vague idea that their children somehow have superior immune systems, the Andrew Tate school of science.

The Covid vaccines did not prevent people from getting Covid, but rather prevented them from becoming seriously ill.

Children were not at risk of becoming seriously ill, therefore the vaccine for them made no sense whatsoever.

Anybody at high risk of complications from Covid would be (hopefully) vaccinated.

You didn't think that if your child contracted Covid they could spread it exponentially to hundreds of people who also were unvaccinated?

This is really naive.

This is really naive.

This.

And it’s exactly why I didn’t have my children vaccinated against Covid.

But don’t you think the NHS and government have certain axes to grind also?

For example, most GPs will push for women to be on the pill, regardless of whether it is the safest and best option for them. It’s cheap and reliably prevents pregnancy, so it’s a tick from them.

They also seem hell bent on recommending the Mirena coil, despite it clearly not suiting many women.

It’s in the NHS and government’s interests to get people vaccinated en masse - it creates herd immunity and eradicates illness on a large scale. Again, a tick for them.

What they’re not interested in is the effect on the individual. Or the small but significant number of vaccine injuries each year. Which is why we all have to try to make as informed a decision as we can and not (necessarily) rely on the data that’s given to us.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist or anything; I just think it’s a lot more complicated than it seems.

Specialists have to give advice that is best at population level. Parents have to make choices based on what their believe is best for their individual child. The two things are different.

Ans if someone chooses not to vaccinate, they don’t owe anyone an explanation. They are free to make their own choices without having to justify it to random strangers or anyone else.

Horrifyingly, it happens and this couple are beyond belief. It must be brainwashing:

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/03/20/texas-measles-family-gaines-county-death/

There’s somebody earlier on this thread saying they hope that it doesn’t happen to them and that they end up in the Daily Mail because of it. I can only think they’re being flippant because they’re so sure these diseases won’t happen to their children. I find it fascinating that the very thing they’re benefiting from - herd immunity - is the very thing they seem to think doesn’t exist. The cognitive dissonance is stunning.

Ok I'm very much pro vax but i will (again) try and explain how I understand this 'own research'.
The statements that are put out by PHE or the NHS or the CDC are scientific. Of course they are. But they're ALSO political. There have been multiple examples where it's been obvious that what we are being told is for the good of SOCIETY rather than the individual. For example when covid vaccinations were offered to youngsters. On the whole people in their 20s are at extremely low personal risk of covid. They are also (at least with the AZ jab) at relatively high risk of vaccine injury, the main reason to vaccinate the. Was to lower the levels of virus circulating to protect elderly or vulnerable people.
Or take the NHS deciding NOT to vaccinate kids against chicken pox until very recently. It wasn't really explained that the reason for this was not for the benefit if those kids (who still risked potential complications from CP) but actually to protect elderly people from shingles because children would be effectively giving them a 'booster' by getting sick themselves, thereby saving the NHS money on treating elderly with shingles. As I said I am personally very much pro (most) vaccines but I can see why some people feel they absolutely can't trust or believe what they're told. Can't you?
And if you DON'T trust it, then you are actively putting something into your child's body that could potentially harm them. So that's on you. Rather than just on the 'Universe' if they became naturally infected with one of these viruses.

But vaccination is the recommended course of action by specialists in that field, you can't give equal weight to a layperson who has 'done their research' because they don't have the same level of academic qualification or training.

So if you are making a conscious decision to go against expert advice, it's perfectly reasonable that the onus is on you to explain your reasoning behind that decision.

Hi! I get what you’re saying and it sounds reasonable but I feel like there is a key difference. Choosing not to get a vaccine impacts the individual concerned and also everyone around them. I think this is especially important for people who have medical reasons not to have a vaccine. So what we are now seeing is too many people are opting out and we have some children very sick in hospital with measles and occasionally they even die. A few years ago, we considered measles to be eliminated.

So that is why people tend to feel justified asking about a no vaccine decision. And the other reason is because there is lots of pseudoscience floating around on the internet and also in general conversation - for example a friend of mine told me a few months ago that she feared that her nephew had got autism as result of having the MMR. That research was proven to be fraudulent more than 20 years ago but she just wouldn’t have it. Another friend, told me that she had done about 100 hours of ‘research’ online (this was during the covid years) and had discovered that there is a conspiracy among doctors across the world to keep it a secret from everyone that vaccines are dangerous. This is quite obviously absolutely ridiculous. She believes that it is good advice on the (Amrerican) Dr Mercola website to take his pills and potions - which very conveniently were for sale on the same website.

i think anyone deciding not to have a vaccine should get personal advice from a qualified medical professional and not rely on what they find on the internet. I do not believe it is possible for the average person to make an informed decision by googling. Anyone who has not got a degree in medicine, pharmacy, virology or whatever, is unlikely to be able to understand all the ins and outs. In the end, this is why all these people have to train and study and take exams endlessly because it is very complicated.

Data from "Big Pharma" is peer reviewed and independently tested in totally separate laboratories and companies, sometimes in other countries. There is more research done over many years and this costs £millions. Covid was a virus, of which some parts were already under research, and many laboratories all over the world were collaborating at the same time as it was an urgent and dangerous situation.

Testing on humans is rigorous. Exceptions always occur as we, as humans, are not uniform. It is the same for animals.

Research by antivaxxers is not undertaken under laboratory conditions with placebos. They also do not have £millions to test their "theories". We have only their words as evidence, which are not proven evidence. It all only gossip and supposition.

1,500 measles cases in 42 US states. Worst outbreak since 1992. This is what happens when people don’t vaccinate their children.

I also know many people who work for pharmaceutical companies, from drug discovery startups to big companies like GSK. These are people with PhDs and extensive scientific career experience, who see their jobs as lifesaving scientific work (and who publish their own research under their own names too, so don’t have any interest in crapping up their own scientific reputations); and there are hundreds and thousands of them. They are not all sitting around conspiring together to unleash evil on the world for profit.

This is a complete misunderstanding of how vaccines are developed and monitored. We have one of the most extensive legal regulatory regimes around public health in the world. Take a good read of all the information available here, for example:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/ukhsas-vaccine-development-and-evaluation-centre-vdec

This is a government department in our civil service which evaluates vaccine safety data in one of the most advanced labs in the world. Do you think they are conspiring with “Big Pharma”? What would be the point of that? Their job is to prevent and fix public health crises. If they allowed a dangerous vaccine to go to market they would be the people who had to sort out the mess!

You are making a basic mistake - the data on established vaccinations is public health data, compiled over many years by all aspects of our health services and medical researchers, and freely available to everyone. “Big Pharma” only do initial drugs trials for their own products. But we have vaccine safety and epidemiology data for lots of different products, all from different companies and producers and different countries, from many decades of medical research (even more than a century of public health statistics in the case of some vaccines).

Have you ever actually looked at, for example, the epidemiology data available on our government public health websites? This is not compiled and analysed by “Big Pharma”. It’s compiled, produced, analysed and made use of by our health service and civil service, as well as used by many different academic and commercial researchers. Every country publishes this data . Start with:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/immunisation

www.gov.uk/government/organisations/uk-health-security-agency

https://www.nhs.uk/vaccinations/

I'm older so grew up pre many of today's vaccines being available. I have known many people permanently injured by illnesses for which vaccines are available. DHs nan was deaf from measles, as I said before there were 2 children in my small village brain damaged by measles, also one born deaf after her mum caught German measles while pregnant. A school friend's sibling was stillborn, damaged by German measles. I've known 2 adults end up in intensive care having caught chicken pox. Growing up I knew many people with damaged limbs from polio including a cousin and a friends mum. My dad lost 3 friends in a diphtheria outbreak. I don't know one single person damaged by vaccines, not one. I have no doubt that there are people who have suffered in this way but I think many people grilossly overestimate the risk compared to the illnesses.

Exactly. It's Big Pharma who will claim that side effects/injuries/deaths are 'rare' - but they would say that, wouldn't they? However, based on what we've seen on this thread alone, it seems these events aren't nearly as rare as they'd have us believe.