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.

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

Except the chances of your daughter coming into contact with another unvaccinated child who has mumps is now a hell of a lot higher than the chances of her having an adverse reaction to the vaccine.

You are putting your daughters life at risk by not vaccinating her. Piss poor parenting. End of.

They aren’t made up. The GP is the father of a friend and very anti vaccinations generally (obviously doesn’t express this to his patients), nurses have told me straight they felt I was doing the right thing by avoiding vaccinations when my son was little (my son had them on a delayed schedule), I have family member who works in pharmaceuticals who perceives them as a risk for a range of reasons. The teacher is a non vaccinating friend.

As for the risks you maths is wrong. If you give a vaccination the risk of the side effect is whatever that is (say 1/100,000 or whatever). If they have a side effect from catching the disease the risk isn’t just the risk of the side effect but also how likely it is the child would catch the disease in the first place so maybe risk of catching the disease 1/100,000 and then the risk of side effect 1/100 or whatever) In most situations that risk is going to be less than the risk associated with vaccinating.

I think the biggest issue with all this is that there is no non biased info anywhere. People are either adamant there are no risks with vaccines or adamant there are no benefits. The reality is somewhere in between with risks associated with both choices.

Personally I think people should just be allowed to make their own decisions. There isn’t another time we force people to have medical treatment against their will

However, when vaccines came out (especially for measles etc) they were amazing because everyone knew someone who'd lost a child to measles so those stories of vaccine damaged paled in comparison. People who knew my great-grandmother knew a woman who had lost seven children to measles. That doesn't happen anymore and people are complacent because the only time they hear of M, M or R it's a small outbreak and symptoms are mild.

Roald Dahl lost his daughter to complications of measles in the days before the vaccine was available. When a vaccine did come out he was one of it's biggest champions and wrote articles urging parents to take it up for their children.

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

Every scientist, doctor, nurse, and other medical professional I have ever met has been fiercely pro-vaccination and I worked in the NHS so I met a lot. Anti-vaxxers were widely considered to be idiots of the highest order.

People are either adamant there are no risks with vaccines

Who is adamant there are no risks? The little information leaflet packaged up with every dose of vaccines spells out the risks and side effects. It even categorises them into common, uncommon, rare, extremely rare, etc. These risks and side effects range from tenderness at the injection site (common) right the way up to vaccine damage (extremely rare).

Nobody. Absolutely nobody says there are no risks with vaccines. Nothing which works comes with no side effects.

I'm not antiVax, but I am anti choice of single jabs over the much pushed multijabs. The one size fits all thing doesn't work for all of our DCs, especially were there undiagnosed health issues at play. Many conditions can take years to get a diagnosis for, so the lack of safe choices is disgusting.

My DD nearly died after her first multijab at 10 weeks old, this turned out to be a known, if very hushed reaction to the jab. There was no way in hell was she having the MMR after that as we know 2 families with similarly low immunity DCs who reacted badly to the MMR, regressed & were never the same again. One was a twin & the health twin was fine, but the weaker of the 2 wasn't.

I just think it's too much of an overload for such little bodies & not all can safely handle that.

We were lucky to have the money & to be able to find single jabs for her, so she is inoculated, but had we not had access to those I would not have risked her with MMR after what happened after her first multijab

“My DD nearly died after her first multijab at 10 weeks old, this turned out to be a known, if very hushed reaction to the jab”
When you say “hushed” do you mean “rare”?

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".
Exactly.
That right there is why I will always vaccinate my DCs where possible.
My DC2 had genuine medical reasons for his routine vaccinations to be delayed, but he’s completely caught up now with all the recommended childhood vaccinations.
I’ll take the very small chance of a vaccine injury over watching helplessly as my child died from a preventable disease.

As for the risks you maths is wrong. If you give a vaccination the risk of the side effect is whatever that is (say 1/100,000 or whatever). If they have a side effect from catching the disease the risk isn’t just the risk of the side effect but also how likely it is the child would catch the disease in the first place so maybe risk of catching the disease 1/100,000 and then the risk of side effect 1/100 or whatever) In most situations that risk is going to be less than the risk associated with vaccinating.

This attitude is so incredibly incredibly selfish.

Your 'maths' only works if only a few stupid, selfish fuckfaces don't vaccinate their children....

Regarding women’s fertility specifically, it’s known that 5% (1in20) women who contract mumps experience swelling of the ovaries.

Whether this causes infertility at any level is under researched because, unlike testicles, ovaries are internal, and the swelling is less obvious.

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

Bullshit

I mean as in the hospital where she as in intensive care fir 2 weeks weren't diagnosing her with anything concrete & avoided answering direct questions until I got stroppy. Then they acknowledged that it was vaccine linked. 3 other babies on the same small hospital had the same problem & I've since met many more, so I'm not sure how rare that would make it, but it doesn't feel that way to me. Under reported, yes. Years later I found out that there was meant to be some "yellow card " system fir vaccine injury, but none of that ever happened to us or the others on the ward

@Curious2468 - medical statistics don't really work like that. One risk from vaccines is an allergic response; you probably know already if you have a child with a lot of allergies or if this is a common risk in your family; these people shouldn't be vaccinated and rely on everyone else being vaccinated to protect them. The next set of risks is from being injected with the disease. The
vaccination form of measles is actually a milder form than wild measles that your child could get; if their reaction would be mild anyway then no harm; stronger reactions they might get include fever, stuffy nose and mild spots - this is great as they're then protected from getting the severe form where their reaction would be much worse. Moving on from death rate you also have to consider all those other effects that are far now likely with full-blown measles than with vaccine; deafness, infertility etc.

The risk of catching it eventually is quite high; vaccines don't give 100% immunity (mumps is only 88% effective after 2 doses) so you add that to your unvaccinated group, plus people who are immune compromised due to chemotherapy / spleen removal etc, plus you might travel and meet even higher proportions of unvaccinated people. How many people will your child meet in school each week plus say a holiday to Italy by plane? Actually there have been a lot of cases of teenagers catching mumps at university.

The next advantage is that you are choosing WHEN with a vaccination; I'm delighted to be able to vaccinate my child while he's healthy. This is much better than your child catching one of these diseases alongside scarlet fever or another severe unpreventable illness, dramatically increasing the risk to their ability to recover healthily. If you want to be selfish, you also don't need weeks off work at inconvenient times and no visits to Aunt X because she's immune compromised. As a bonus, your kid can't infect a young baby and put her life at risk, when her parents have no choice because vaccination is only possible at 12 months.

As for the risks you maths is wrong. If you give a vaccination the risk of the side effect is whatever that is (say 1/100,000 or whatever). If they have a side effect from catching the disease the risk isn’t just the risk of the side effect but also how likely it is the child would catch the disease in the first place so maybe risk of catching the disease 1/100,000 and then the risk of side effect 1/100 or whatever) In most situations that risk is going to be less than the risk associated with vaccinating.

If you're going to say the maths is wrong, show us the maths you think is right. You can't just say something like 'in most situations that risk is going to be less than the risk associated with vaccinating' and not actually show how that's true, or you're just spreading an uninformed opinion masquerading as the truth.

The risk of dying as a result of a vaccine is so small it's actually not possible to statistically quantify.

The risk of dying in the UK from one vaccine preventable disease - let's pick measles - is 693 out of 2 billion. That doesn't sound like a very big chance, does it? But remember, this is compared to a chance of dying from a vaccine - any vaccine, not just measles - being so low, it's not statistically identifiable.

And, of course, the risk in the UK is based on today's infection rate. We are still in a situation where the majority of people are vaccinated against measles. What happens if the antivax agenda prevails and more and more people forego vaccinating their kids. The risk of infection is going to increase. The likelihood of dying from measles is going to increase.

I think the biggest issue with all this is that there is no non biased info anywhere. People are either adamant there are no risks with vaccines or adamant there are no benefits. The reality is somewhere in between with risks associated with both choices

The CDC, the WHO and The Vaccine Safety Network are all unbiased sources. The reason they don't tell you that the risk of vaccine injury is comparable to the risk of injury from vaccine preventable illnesses is because that would be a lie.

Personally I think people should just be allowed to make their own decisions. There isn’t another time we force people to have medical treatment against their will*

We aren't talking about people refusing consent for themselves, we are talking about people refusing consent for their children and in those circumstances the government intervenes all the time. And that's before you consider that refusing medical treatment rarely endangers the lives of other people...

Let's not all attack the ant-vaxxers too much. Last year British Intelligence released a report saying that a lot of the ant-vaxx homepages in the Western countries are made by Russian Intelligence in order to destabilise the Western democracies. Their evaluation was that the homepages look very professional and it is understandable that people get fooled by them.

Anti vaxxers may well be dealing with furious young adults. Dh (healthy wealthy and super fit if relevant ) randomly caught mumps in his mid twenties. He was extremely ill and his fertility was threatened he got the strain that can make men infertile. If the reason he went through that was due to his parents crack pot ideas - well that’s a conversation I wouldn’t want to have.

As for the risks you maths is wrong. If you give a vaccination the risk of the side effect is whatever that is (say 1/100,000 or whatever). If they have a side effect from catching the disease the risk isn’t just the risk of the side effect but also how likely it is the child would catch the disease in the first place so maybe risk of catching the disease 1/100,000 and then the risk of side effect 1/100 or whatever)

The risk of the child catching the disease is low because of... vaccination.
The risk of the child catching the disease without vaccination is very high. That is why they were called childhood diseases. And that is why such vaccinations are given when children are very young.

Then, it's laughable that you're comparing having a range of side effects from very mild (a small rash) to more serious (very rarely death) with having the disease (at least a few days at home feeling poorly to death - more frequent than from vaccination).

@septemberdread your kids need all vaccines available to them. Mumps is a potentially very serious illness for anyone, girl/boy/ man/ woman. As is Rubella if you are a female. Its exactly this attitude to think you can go against mainstream, accepted medical advice & just pick and choose the bits you want to believe. How is the single measles vaccine ok & the MMR is not??
Can you give me an example of this damage from vaccines you speak of please?

@septemberdread so you've avoided getting the Rubella vaccine for your DDs have you? Consider it to be 'a minor illness' do you? I do hope your DDs don't get it while they're pregnant. All that reading and researching you did clearly missed the very serious danger to unborn babies if their mothers catch Rubella (aka German measles) while they're pregnant.

www.cdc.gov/rubella/about/complications.html

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".

If you walk around older cemeteries you'll see headstones showing multiple children from the same family all dying within days of one another. I cant even fathom how awful it must be to lose one child let alone three, four, or five over the course of less than a week.

Vaccines were developed because people wanted to prevent deaths like these.

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

They aren’t made up. The GP is the father of a friend and very anti vaccinations generally (obviously doesn’t express this to his patients), nurses have told me straight they felt I was doing the right thing by avoiding vaccinations when my son was little (my son had them on a delayed schedule), I have family member who works in pharmaceuticals who perceives them as a risk for a range of reasons. The teacher is a non vaccinating friend.

Even believing this is true, it's one GP (I had one doctor trying to peddle homeopathy on me ), one family member in pharmaceuticals (any guesses at the type of work - scientist or technician?) and a random teacher (neither a scientist nor a doctor, and anti all vaccines?). I'm going to guess max of 2 nurses (specialty on infectious diseases or immunology? Doubt it. Also no scientist or doctor) and if anything it was avoiding when very young (again, all vaccines?).

So, one older GP... probably not even directly and did he mean all vaccinations?

@septemberdread so you've avoided getting the Rubella vaccine for your DDs have you? Consider it to be 'a minor illness' do you? I do hope your DDs don't get it while they're pregnant. All that reading and researching you did clearly missed the very serious danger to unborn babies if their mothers catch Rubella (aka German measles) while they're pregnant.

Not to mention that some people cannot assimilate the rubella vaccine and so have no immunity to it. I've been vaccinated against rubella eight times and still have no immunity to it, it appears to be a family trait as my mother, aunts, and most of my female cousins are the same (all tested during pregnancy). I'm past my pregnancy days now but at the time I was very anxious about the idea of rubella potentially circulating in the wider community as I knew I had no immunity to it.

Everyone who is able to receive the MMR should have the MMR, not only will it protect them but it also protects others and if they are one of the people who cannot assimilate the vaccine (which you wouldn't know unless tested) then that herd immunity is even more important.

I don’t think they will be getting pregnant at 3 and 2.

Obviously immunity will be checked when they are in their teens. If they aren’t immune then we can look into the vaccination.

how likely it is the child would catch the disease in the first place

More and more likely if more people stop vaccinating. In the decade before the vaccine was available, there were 160,000 to 800,000 measles notifications in the UK per year.

@septemberdread - they would get immunity from the vaccine, or from catching the diseases. Where else do you think immunity comes from? Immunity from rubella isn't a special ingredient only put into the expensive cornflakes, it's the human body having learned to fight a specific disease. Huge numbers of us would catch polio and smallpox too if they hadn't been eradicated; we didn't all become immune, we benefited from the vaccinations of the generations that came before us.