Why are some parents/families anti vax?

[Sistersis]

Just read an article about the UK no longer being measles free. Just trying to understand what are the reasons that some people are against vaccination.

Not being cheeky here, geniuenly interested. Sorry if this has been done already.

“That the bottle is filled with what the pharmaceutical company say it is filled with”

You could use that argument for any medicine you are given ever. Any drug we give you in hospital, any bag of fluid. It’s hardly exclusive to vaccines.

There's little point in putting up an argument against these anti vax, conspiracy buying, tinfoil hatted fools.

Never argue with an idiot: they'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

“I know more scientists and doctors who are antivax than uneducated people”

Uneducated people tend to trust what their doctor tells them.

Then you have chemists/physicists/engineers who think they understand health sciences.

I know a few bio and health scientists and plenty of medical doctors and none is an anti-vaxxer. Having said that, none thinks that anything called vaccine is without criticism. That doesn't make them anti-vaxxers at all.

Then you find out that some vaccines were grown on embryos (So that means another child died so mine wouldn't get a deadly disease. Absolutely morally unacceptable.)

This is just not true. Simply not a fact.

Some vaccines (rubella, hepatitis, rabies, chickenpox) rely on cell lines created from cells obtained via two legal and elective abortions which took place in the 1960s. Those abortions did not take place to produce cell lines. The decisions to abort were made independently, for personal reasons, by the women carrying those fetuses. The fetuses would always have been terminated. A child did not die to prevent your child getting sick. A fetus was terminated because the woman carrying it no longer wanted to be pregnant.

The cell lines derived from those fetuses have been growing on their own in laboratories for 50 years. No further fetal sources are required to make the vaccinations which rely on these cell lines. The descendent cells are not themselves the cells of the aborted fetus. Vaccines are not 'grown on embryos'.

The Catholic Church recommends vaccination of children despite its dissatisfaction that current cell lines originate from aborted fetal tissue. It is recognised that the harm caused by not vaccinating far outweighs the harm of relying on fetal tissue from a fetus which would always have been aborted.

The use of fetal tissue as described above is not a secret.

Facts are important. Please don't share misinformation.

GPs, nurses, academic sciences, teachers, pharmaceutical scientists.

Most people I know who don’t vaccinate have done way more research than the average person who vaccinated.

Because they believe it is all a big pharma conspiracy.

I have a small relative who has a life limiting condition. He cannot be vaccinated because of this. Every time he catches a 'common' illness, it means 1-2 weeks stay in hospital, often in isolation and often unsure if he will emerge.

Of course it is all a conspiracy.

In the majority of cases mumps is a mild disease. I wouldn’t send my child to school unwell in any case.

And you don't seem to understand that most of these diseases are most contagious before symptoms appear.

Because they are weapons grade morons?
We live in a privileged time where people have either forgotten or have never seen the devastating side effects and deaths from vaccine preventable diseases.
And as for the vaccine injury thing, that simply doesn’t wash with me. Yes there are potential risks/side effects of vaccines - same as any other medicine you might take You could pop a couple of ibuprofen, and die because a stomach ulcer you didn’t know you had starts bleeding. You could take literally any medicine out there, have an allergic reaction to it and die.
Anti-vaxxers saying that they won’t vaccinate because of the risk of vaccine injury is the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever heard.

To those who only have daughters - look up the effects of rubella in pregnancy.

Vaccines have risks. Vaccine damage is a thing and for some people this is a bigger risk than not vaccinating their children. If you aren’t convinced by that please ask to look at the info sheet that comes with the vaccines

If by this you mean that some people have complicating factors which increase the risk of vaccines, such as allergies or autoimmune conditions, then you're absolutely right. Those people shouldn't have vaccinations, and are reliant on herd immunity to protect them.

If, on the other hand, you mean that some people perceive the risk of vaccines to be greater than the risk of the diseases they prevent, then your position is quite easily disproved by looking at the statistics on the info sheet and comparing them to the statistics on the corresponding disease. In every case, the danger of vaccination injury to people who do not have complicating risk factors is significantly - by orders of magnitude - less than the danger of the disease.

Curious2468 Tue 20-Aug-19 11:40:07
GPs, nurses, academic sciences, teachers, pharmaceutical scientists.

Most people I know who don’t vaccinate have done way more research than the average person who vaccinated.

Sure....

Has any (of those mostly made up people) actually read scientific articles and been involved in vaccine research?
And are they against all vaccines?

We live in a privileged time where people have either forgotten or have never seen the devastating side effects and deaths from vaccine preventable diseases.
And as for the vaccine injury thing, that simply doesn’t wash with me. Yes there are potential risks/side effects of vaccines

We do, fortunately, live in an age where people are more likely to have seen vaccine damage than the damage done by measles.

That's why it's more important than ever to educate people, properly, about how dangerous measles and the likes actually are.

If you've got a parent of 19/20 then chances are they don't know anyone who has had M, M or R. They don't know anyone who can't have children because of it. They don't know anyone who died from it.

Crucially they don't have family stories of it either. My grandparents probably raced to the vax clinic with their children because they both had multiple siblings who died from measles. They know the effects. People now don't.

Getting folks backs up by attacking them for being stupid for not knowing something that they've never encountered doesn't help.

The MMR scandal is largely responsible for a lot of the anti vax feeling - even after Wakefield was struck off for gross professional misconduct (for clarity - he lied about his research, his conclusions had no basis in scientific fact) there were people umming and ahing and saying “no smoke without fire”.

The guilt that many parents of vaccinated children with autism felt when that blew up was just horrible.

I think Wakefield tapped into a mentality of fairly mild anti state middle class liberalism. People saw not vaccinating as a benign way to confirm a political position, and a way to confirm they were consciously making a choice for their child, rather than blindly poisoning them like all the sheep.

They do, I am sure, want the best for their child - but only have the luxury of doing so because most other children are vaccinated. It is the herd immunity they refuse to participate in that allows them to take their stance. Ironic, really.

It is so encouraging to see that this thread has been full of sensible contributions making it clear that not to vaccinate is entirely wrong.

So often these threads attract the mumbo-jumbo brigade and just spread more anti-vaccination propaganda.

lyralalala - did you go along with your OH's wishes? Frankly I would just have got on and had them vaccinated - and if he found out and cut up rough I would have waved him happily goodbye. What would he have said if he had come into the kitchen to find you allowing your one-year old to play with the carving knife? Horrified no doubt that you would put his child at risk.

I got mumps in sixth form. I then suffered post viral for months. Fucked up my A-Level year and I had to re-sit.

Negative consequences are not only health related septemberdread.

Because people love to buy in to conspiracy theories, government is out to get them etc.

My childrens health is not something that im willing to don a tin foil hat for.

there were people umming and ahing and saying “no smoke without fire”

I often wonder if Wakefield's crime would have been able to have so much of an impact if it wasn't so unfortunately timed generation wise after the thalidomide tragedy.

When my Gran asked her Mum about vaccines Great-Gran said "Yes, do it. I lost 7 to measles. Mary lost 4. There might be a risk, but so many wee coffins mean it's worth it".

However, when it came to my turn to say "People are saying there could be something dodgy in it, what do I do?" my then inlaws were saying "Well it's generally a good thing, but then again there is thalidomide... sometimes there's no smoke without fire"

@Mishappening did you go along with your OH's wishes? Frankly I would just have got on and had them vaccinated - and if he found out and cut up rough I would have waved him happily goodbye. What would he have said if he had come into the kitchen to find you allowing your one-year old to play with the carving knife? Horrified no doubt that you would put his child at risk

I half did.

They had the first single vaccine. I really was under a huge amount of pressure and the internet was full of scare stories. Not helped at all that I do know someone whose child was genuinely damaged by vaccine (and they were compensated by the damages fund). Then my friend's very kind Mum (I had abusive parents, was removed at 7, my Nana had dementia at that point so I literally had no-one to turn too - even my HV just said "Do your research" in a non-helpful way) sat me down and properly talked over the risks versus the benefits. She also explained what happened with the child we know (and crucially told me that that child's younger siblings were vaccinated)

They then had the MMR before he came back from his stint away with the military. There was hell to pay for it, but it was too late by then.

@isittheholidaysyet wiki isn't exactly a reliable source of information, given that anyone can edit it more or less

I do think there is a generational aspect to this, and not just in that my generation (Gen X / early Millennial) hasn't witnessed the effects of these deadly diseases, but that we did grow up in a time when a lot of big companies and government scandals were exposed.

When I was growing up we learned that Big Tabacco had been hiding the full extent of how dangerous cigarettes were for decades. We grew up when Big Tobacco was still marketing to kids.

When I was growing up the full extent of the CIA's experiments into LCD, etc were released (and this wasn't conspiracy)

We learned about just how corrupt and misguided Vietnam was and watched while the US went into Gulf War II on a lie.

We grew up with lakes and rivers being polluted for decades by companies who just didn't give a shit.

Gen X/Millennial's are an extremely cynical bunch, we've learned you can't trust the government or big business to have your best interests at heart (hence the ongoing obesity & climate change crisis's).

And a little bit of cynicism is fine, we shouldn't blindly trust people in power.

Unfortunately, the result of so much exposure to corruption and so much cynicism is that you start to see it everywhere, even where it logically makes no sense (moon landing deniers, flat earthers, anti vaxxers).

I've said this before on here- my imbecile of a NDN is an anti vaxxer. The only one I know. She is also a lover of the white powder which makes people paranoid.

She would rather her kids have no vaccines than catch "the autism" which my fully vaccinated ds has and I'm being tested myself at 41.

She is a thick and ignorant person and her youngest is displaying lots of signs of ADHD and behavioural issues. She starts school soon and NDN is panicking because one of the forms asks about immunisation dates.

You can't argue with stupid.

Sorry to hear about that dione but similar happened to me at uni with glandular fever. It sucks, though.

Lweji I understand it but my answer is the same - my children won’t have vaccinations that don’t benefit them. They will and have had vaccinations that do.

Mumps is a mild disease. Alright then. Tell that to my sister who had to take 6 weeks off of work, and was so ill she lost 3 stone in a month. She caught a severe strain of mumps despite being vaccinated because 2 children she worked with were not vaccinated.

Anti vaxxers are fucking morons. And educated, intelligent anti vaxxers are cunts. The end.

September you do know that many of these diseases are contagious before symptoms appear? What presents as mild in one person can be serious in an other.

Of course, but in the majority of cases mumps is mild.

Is there a tiny chance my unvaccinated for mumps daughter could meet an unvaccinated for mumps boy who then gets the disease and has complications? Yes: a tiny one. But there’s also a tiny chance my child could have an adverse reaction to the vaccine. A tiny one, of course.

But I am not giving her a vaccine for a disease that won’t harm her. That’s my duty as a parent - to make decisions in the best interest of my child.

Because two members of their family suffered anaphylactic shock and one was left with brain damage.