I did vaccinate my child. But late, because it took me a really long time to process all of the arguments, most of which I'd never been aware of before.
Overall, it was just such a big shock. I'd spent all my life believing that vaccines were never harmful and always 100% effective, that the diseases they protected from were always life threatening and terrible and then suddenly I came across this information which said that vaccines can harm or kill (and not the autism thing, which is what people always assume you are talking about, because that was never true, but there is such a thing as vaccine damage), vaccines aren't always effective, there are also figures which show that immunity was increasing anyway before vaccination, and that some of the diseases vaccination protects against used to be considered quite everyday.
I just found it really hard to take in and it paralysed me. Plus I swallowed all of the crap about it being hard on a baby's immune system to have so many vaccines at once (I no longer believe this) and decided it would be better to spread things out.
It wasn't due to herd immunity that I considered not vaccinating my child, that was never in the equation. And in the end I decided to not because I thought that vaccination was essential, but because I decided that these diseases are now much more rare and if my child did get measles or whatever then he'd be much more likely to end up in hospital having quite a traumatic experience about it rather than it just being like, say, chicken pox. Again, I've changed my view now, and would get future children vaccinated on schedule. But it's really hard when pro-vaccination arguments stick to this line of "Vaccination is 100% safe, 100% needed, 100% effective" and that just seemed implausible to me. I could see that anti-vaccination arguments thrived on scaremongering and some false information - one of the most common anti-vaccination things is to have them tell you to print out a form for the doctor/nurse to sign which personally held them responsible for any damage caused by the vaccine they were about to administer. The anti-vax argument is "No doctor will sign this. Now think about that!" - well, yeah, FFS of course no doctor is going to sign that! Are you going to ask a surgeon to sign saying they're personally responsible for you potentially dying during surgery as well? - but they still seemed to be telling more of the truth than the pro-vaccination side who seemed eager to convince you that everything is fine and scaremonger in the opposite direction. It's a really strange thing for that - with most other debates I've found, it's usually easier to find factual information on both sides whereas this is just a scaremongering food fight of an argument with both sides screaming and flinging shit at each other, like monkeys.
Overall I've come to the conclusion that vaccines, like any other medication, are of course never 100% safe or effective. But they are safe and effective enough to make them worth it. Against the potential dangers of disease, the risk balances. Vaccinating is safer than not vaccinating. But it took a really long time for me to come to that conclusion because of the just huge lack of decent information about it. This is the absolute best, balanced, non lying article I've read about vaccination, ever, and I recommend everyone should read it: Dear Parents, you are being lied to