Genuine question for anti-vaxxers

I went to a surgeons museum in Edinburgh, great place for seeing medical equipment from throughout the ages and lots of things in jars but there were some things that never left me such as images and paintings of people wild eyed with pain and terror during a tetanus spasm that's contorting their entire bodies!
These are illnesses that you would have to be a total bastard to put your kids through whilst you sit back with your luxury protection because your parents didn't join tin foil cults! Nobody had an issue with jabs until the cult instructed them to!

I used to work near a graveyard once that I used to walk around sometimes on my lunch hour, it was a very old graveyard and had a lot of children buried in it, many graves had multiple siblings in it because the diseases swept through entire families, many adults were lucky if they lived through their 30"s! That's the dark legacy that gets left, the anti vaxxers kids that don't die in childhood could become like the people that died early in adulthood, they carry on the legacy from Granny & Grandad Anti vax and generations are born where the premature death rate is high! How do you sleep at night knowing you are volunteering your kids to vicious illnesses that you are protected from!

Even some of the milder complications are things like infertility! That's going to be a good conversation when these kids grow up passionately wanting a family & having to deal with the fact that their parents were responsible for voluntarily removing their infertility! Do these anti vaxxers think of the hate and disownment they've got coming if they voluntarily give their kids long term health issues that dog them for the rest of their life!

To be honest, I think that anyone who cites “toxic stress” as equivalent to the brain injuries that can be caused by measles encephalitis is not educated or informed about medicine, or posting in good faith.

And yet there were still women who had disabled babies or stillbirths because of rubella, and some children who had brain damage from varicella encephalitis, deafness, vision loss or cognitive impairments from measles, young men who had fertility problems from mumps, and so on. For some people it was actually very serious; as a small child you would have been unaware of these cases and so naturally you just recall it all being fine.

I was once on a live MN thread about ten years ago where a mum couldn’t wake her fifteen month old, and posters came on to say get him to A&E now, including another poster’s DH who was a GP. It turned out that the baby had encephalitis from undiagnosed chickenpox (with only a few spots on his foot). The mum came back on a while later to say he had survived, but had a long road to recovery. I often think about her and her child and hope they are okay. Childhood illnesses are not always all simple and minor, and most Western countries now vaccinate for chickenpox because even though it’s generally mild, in rare cases it can be disastrous.

Your treatment was "off label". Does that mean it was not a tried and tested drug for your symptoms? If so, why was it given to you?

It was more a chicken pox party thing in the 80's but ultimately people need to understand what we were exposed to as kids wasn't a potentially very serious illness without being jabbed.

^ was?

My cousin had a very severe reaction to a vaccine and ended up profoundly disabled for the rest of her life. She died in her 40s, mentally never progressing beyond 2, the age when she was vaccinated. My aunt and uncle broke their backs caring for her.
But, I still chose to vaccinate my DC - as I didn't want to feel responsible for him getting one of the diseases had I chosen not to....and I figured I was only even considering not vaccinating because, as you say, I hadn't seen such severe illnesses in my lifetime. But I do have sympathy with the fears around side effects.

It was more a chicken pox party thing in the 80's but ultimately people need to understand what we were exposed to as kids wasn't a potentially very serious illness without being jabbed.

It was true of my childhood! Our local GP encouraged kids to play together if anyone had German measles (as long as no mothers were pregnant!), so that we would all catch it young, and get it over and done with. He used to ring us up if he knew of a case. He was particularly keen for girls to catch it, so that they needn't worry about infection later in life when pregnant. I think it was fairly common in the 1960s, because there was no way to prevent rubella except through natural immunity. It was like an unexploded grenade, we tried our best to control how it affected our lives rather than just letting it circulate unpredictably and reach vulnerable pregnant women. It's wonderful that vaccination now offers protection.

Isn’t Covid recommended during pregnancy too? I got pregnant a year ago (with the wonderful baby that’s now in my arms :) ) and went and had the flu and Covid jabs a few weeks after finding out. I also had the others vacs recommended to me by midwifes. I just assumed Covid was also a risk if I caught it whilst pregnant and flu/cold season was approaching..

It annoys me when people claim that our parents had measles parties which just isn't true, I can remember mums being twitchy in my 80's childhood when GM was about and keeping kids away from other kids when they had it.

I am unvaccinated as are my children.

I come from a culture where probably 75% of people are unvaccinated. I did an awful lot of research and put a lot of consideration into my decision as I didn't want to blindly follow my culture when it came to medical choices. I looked into each individual vaccine and the ingredients it contained.

Ultimately I came to the decision not to vaccinate and my husband supported this (he was vaccinated as a child with everything except MMR).

I am very satisfied with my choice. And I'm not some moron who believes social media conspiracies which I know people will jump to, in fact I'm not even on social media at all.

I wouldn't call my self anti-vaccine. But the wide introduction of vaccines coincided with various other public health improvements (public sanitation, personal hygiene, NHS, nutrition,....) so it may be that they get more credit than they are truly deserve (but I am not saying that they don't deserve any).

I am unvaccinated as are my children.

I come from a culture where probably 75% of people are unvaccinated. I did an awful lot of research and put a lot of consideration into my decision as I didn't want to blindly follow my culture when it came to medical choices. I looked into each individual vaccine and the ingredients it contained.

Ultimately I came to the decision not to vaccinate and my husband supported this (he was vaccinated as a child with everything except MMR).

I am very satisfied with my choice. And I'm not some moron who believes social media conspiracies which I know people will jump to, in fact I'm not even on social media at all.

Measles and German measles are totally different diseases. As a PP said GM is rubella.

And although rubella is normally a mild childhood disease it can be devastating for an unborn child.

My mother was pregnant with me, had been visiting a relative with a young child the the next day developed rubella.

Fortunately as it was a family member my mum knew she had been exposed, her only option was injections of gamma globulin.

There was no ultrasound then so she had to wait until I was born to find out if I would be born disabled.

Because there's two types of measles, when I was a kid yes, German measles used to circulated is a much milder disease than the variant we were vaccinated for - plus would it have been as mild if we hadn't been vaccinated! The myth that these disease are mild needs to stop, we weren't exposed to worst version of measles because we were jabbed!

You are generations away from those days but I grew up in those days and children did not routinely die from measles. All children got measles when I was young and I never even heard of anyone being harmed, though there must have been some rare cases

The problem with the HPV vaccine is that it’s only given to girls. As soon as your DD becomes sexually active she will be exposed to the virus. Not only does it cause cervical cancer but it can lead to oral cancer.
I hope you encourage her to attend cervical screening as soon as she is sexually active so any infection can be picked up early.

For anyone unvaccinated let me tell you about a child I saw last week in my hospital.

She was born full term. No time in NICU. Parents a bit odd and didn't get her vaccinated.

At age 3 she contacted an infection. A bad strain. She ended up in ICU as she couldn't breathe. She was then paralysed from the neck down.

She is now 12 and is still paralysed from the neck down and still has a Trachestomy in place.

I don't care what you do with your body but your child doesn't have a say and should be fully vaccinated. This child's life was destroyed by her selfish and ignorant parents.