To think you should have to tell people if your kids aren't vaccinated?

[Saltandpepperpig]

Just found out that one of my cousins is 'anti vaccinations' she's a bit of a hippy and the irony is her DD has now been diagnosed with autism so all this crap they spout about it causing this and that clearly isn't the case there.

Anyway when I had my first child 3 years ago she came to the hospital to see us, had her kids around my newborn maybe 4/5 times in the first week of my child's life! We are close but she knows I'm not like her in many ways hence why she probably hadn't mentioned before.

I don't know what the science is on it but my tiny baby was unprotected at that point and I feel like she should have told me so I could have told her to keep her kids away until the first shots etc.

I'm very newly pregnant and am now panicking as know she will want to be around this baby in the early days too.

AIBU to think if you've decided not to immunise your children then that's a risk you have the right to take with your own kids but should make other people aware?

Also WIBU to tell her she can't bring the kids around this baby in the early days ever ?

YANBU

Tell her its her choice not to vaccinate but its also your choice not to put your child at risk unnecessarily.

Immunoglobulins pass through to your baby in utero plus also in your breastmilk - passing on your own immunity to the very small. Tiny newborns are very unlikely therefore to catch anything from asymptomatic non-vaccinated children.

Ultimately your choice though. You can tell her not to bring anyone unvaccinated to see your baby until it is X old. Though you will seem unreasonable as the risk really is very low indeed.

You sound like you're crowing about her DD having autism, which is nice of you

Certainly tell her to keep away - it is the least you can do to protect your baby from this lunacy.

And maybe send her round a local churchyard to see what happened to unvaccinated children in the past.

I do not think these children should be allowed into school or nursery either.

Get a grip pea, that's not at all what the OP is doing.
Tell her to stay away OP. Your child, your choice.

Glad you mostly agree with me. Pea this is nothing to do with her DD having autism. The risk of anything going wrong from vaccination is also incredibly low. Also due to my own medical problems my baby wasn't breast fed, so she was left very vulnerable to it. I will be telling her to stay away!

I have a child who became autistic literally the day he had the MMR. I was told it was one of the clearest cut cases anyone had ever seen. And because I was studying for a degree in Early Childhood, specialising in Psycholinguistics, at the time, and we had run all our standardised tests on him as our guinea pig, several months before (he was cognitively utterly 'normal' at that point) - we knew it was a fairly obvious case. Half a dozen kids injected from the same batch also developed autism. The dr was later struck off but not for reasons to do with this. Clusters of autism occurred - some with the number of kids rather high - associated with certain batch numbers of vaccine. Don't read that in the Daily Mail, eh? But it was the case.

My subsequent kids had some vaccinations but not that one.

And PIP assessment has ended my son's PIP in 5 years because I think the tories have the cure for autism, apparently.

So yes, it's all hippy bollocks.

YANBU if that is your belief.

I don't tell anyone - never have., They have never asked. So far my kids haven't spread their plague of hippiness to anyone.

Joffrey I'm so sorry. How utterly bloody awful.

Sorry that happened to you Joffrey and also about the cuts to your sons PIP, I used to work in that line of work and had to leave 2 years ago as the cuts I couldn't bare telling people like yourselves that there money would be gone and in some cases that their illnesses were not real.

As for the link between MMR and autism, this article is interesting and does suggest a recent study has proved otherwise, not to diminish your experience -

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/21/no-link-between-mmr-and-autism-major-study-concludes

Because they share your immunity in the womb and through breast milk I'd have thought when they're tiny is the best time for them to see their cousins because they have immunity from you (misses point entirely!!)

Strange how hundres of kids developed it from the same batches of vaccine, then. TBH I am long out of the loop on 'research'. But as part of my (higher) degree I was doing at that time, I did a taught course on Research methodology etc (in the US but son vaccinated when we returned to the UK) and so I am a bit of a cynic when it comes to any kind of research, given the various factors that can skew it. All I know is I had a kid that one day 'became' autistic, after being demonstrably 'not autistic'. Vaccines generally I have no problem with but that one - well I couldn't live with myself if I'd done that to another child.

There are possibly other variables - including the mother's own status re immunity, or so I understood. I lost an earlier baby during pregnancy because I used to work with kids and caught chicken pox from one of the kids in my class when I was 12 weeks pregnant, and I never asked for that to happen, either, so I do get it that germy kids can cause problems for pregnant women, etc.

Late onset autism was always the rarest form until these vaccines came along.

Joffrey

Im not sure they should be forced to declare it

However I also think a lot of anti-vaccination bods are disingenious in that they rely on swathes of other people being vaccinated hence lessening risk of their own precious DCs becoming ill

There's risk in everything so I do get that MMR is going to adversely affect some childen tho

Joffrey that's awful, how is your ds now? I have never heard an actual "real life" case of it happening, it definitely sounds as though it was due to the MMR

There were at least a couple of thousand cases, IIRC from the class action we were involved in (dropped when Blair ended Legal Aid for these cases). The lawyers said my son's case was unusually strong as we had lots of evidence he was cognitively 'normal' not long before the vaccination. One part of my course was standard assessments for pre-school kids and I was the only grad student with a baby so we'd used him as our guinea pig for a massive battery of tests.

In his case, it was clear that very day something had happened.

But in most cases it was less clear cut, I understand, though no less a fact.

Older child vaccinated same day from same batch - probably off schedule as we'd been abroad - had no ill effects. And this was not uncommon. Whatever happened it seemed to affect the babies vaccinated not the slightly older kids. Various theories re. etiology that at this remove in time, I no longer recall.

The lawyers who told me our case was a strong one, had seen hundreds.

Son is now at uni - but couldn't read til he was 17, and still has difficulties. But he is very bright and on course for a First, apparently. He left school with no GCSEs. My younger kids had vaccinations all but MMR. I'm not anti vaccines, as such, just that one.

IIRC (and I might not) there were 3 drugs companies involved in the manufacture of the vaccine that damaged kids (allegedly). The class action had gone so far as to track all the batch numbers and they were seeing clusters of damaged kids around specific batches, which the parents at the time they joined the class action, would have had no way of knowing. But that was a pattern that was emerging. IIRC my son was one of half a dozen or so babies damaged from that one batch. But some others involved more kids. There was some speculation it might be in the storage protocol. Other theories too.

My son's dr was struck off not that long after this happened. Not to do with this but clearly she wasn't exactly stellar.

Just saying to OP and others to keep an open mind. I was the world's biggest supporter of vaccines and 'herd immunity' - having been a teacher, before this.

I no longer read about it or follow research. My son will never be compensated - or the other kids involved. With no Legal Aid we had to drop the class action.

Joffrey, how did your son become autistic overnight? In what way was it so extreme? Just overnight?

So all these people had a really good case, and it was clear from the batch numbers it was definitely that vaccine and the Dr was struck off and... that's it? None of these crazy anti-vac groups with tonnes of money for exactly this purpose were willing to support this supposedly huge class action in the most clear cut case ever of this happening?

You're right, I didn't read about it in the daily mail. Or anywhere. Ever. Hmm. All I read, eleventy billion times, is that VACCINATIONS DO NOT CAUSE AUTISM.

What's that smell? Is that? Um? Is that bullshit?

OP, even vaccinated kids aren't 100% protected. Don't have your baby around them and keep an eye out if they seem unwell in the future. You should be careful around them while you're pregnant too, unless you've already had chickenpox.

I wasjustabouttosaythat

I smell the waft of bullshit too...

I'm autistic and it saddens me that people who hold the (false or otherwise) belief that autism is caused by MMR would sooner put their baby at risk of death than autism... I'd take autism over a painful early death anyday.

Bit rude to diminish Joffrey's experience like that.

I don't want to be rude, but there is a LOT of money in anti-vaxx and I agree it was strange that no one would fund the class action or take it on as no win no fee if it was such a clear cut case.
Correlation is not causation.
The Daily Mail would have loved to print the story. They were big Andrew Wakefield fans.

Iwasjust - actually a quick google will confirm that there was a large class action against MMR, and that it did indeed collapse after legal aid was withdrawn.

I think it is private, like all medical matters. Vaccinations lower your child's risk of catching certain illnesses: they don't cancel it out. What other parents do is up to them.

For those of you keen to read a DM story on this, here it is: www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-198222/MMR-test-case-blow.html. Obviously I have no idea if this is what Joffrey is referring to, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss other people's experiences.

@AvocadoHand that doesn't explain why it wasn't funded by the rather wealthy anti-vaxx movement.
Vaccine damage can be a rare occurrence. However, a meta study of all available data by the Cochrane institute concluded no link between MMR and autism.

YANBU. I know of a baby who died from whooping cough at less than a month old. It scares me and is a big reason I exclusively breast feed