Anti-vaxxers are neglecting their children?

[sallycinnamonn]

Having a conversation with a friend about this whole anti-vaxxers malarkey.

She made an interesting point saying when a parent chooses not to vaccinate their child, it should be seen as neglect, as they are failing to protect them and their wellbeing and are putting them at risk of disease/death. It should be considered neglect just as it would be if the parent was putting them at risk of disease/death through placing them in a inadequate, unsafe environment etc.

I don't agree with anti-vaxxers but have never thought about it this way before. What are your opinions on it being considered as neglect? I'm interested to see what others have to say about her opinion.

SinkGirl you do know that chicken pox isn’t included in the mmr vaccine, yes?

And at no point did I suggest that mmr kills more children than CP, but your response demonstrates well how easy it is to misread something and jump to your own conclusions.

What I said was that we as a society are now failing to draw a comparison between serious illnesses and non serious ones, and as a result parents, instead of vaccinating against the genuinely serious illnesses are deciding not to vaccinate against any of them. Whereas if we campaigned on the illnesses which genuinely are serious such as measles, polio etc, parents would be more inclined to vaccinate against those rather than not wanting to vaccinate against everything such as chicken pox which is not a serious illness.

Yes, some children develop complications, as they can to any illness, the common cold, a paper cut can lead to sepsis. Fifteen deaths a year, while being tragic to the parents whose children they are is a negligible amount and does not change the fact that chicken pox is not a serious illness.

Everything in life carries risks. It is up to us at parents to weigh up those risks and act accordingly. And while I don’t necessarily believe that the CP vaccine carries the risk of harm, neither do I think that chicken pox is serious enough to vaccinate my child against.

More children die in car accidents than from chicken pox, yet no-one says that parents are irresponsible for driving rather than walking do they? In fact a whole industry has arisen to accommodate parents’ desire to take their children in cars, car seats, booster seats etc which although necessary, come in a variety of shapes and prices and ultimately the manufacturers sell them in order to make money.

My local cattery won’t take cats for boarding unless they are fully immunised and up to date with boosters.
It amazes me that we are more careful of cats in this country than children.

If your cat dies of vaccine damage, it's very sad but you can get another cat (and I say that as someone who was heartbroken when my beloved cat died of poisoning after flea treatments). The same can't be said about your child.

My DC1 was allergic to egg and my GP refused to allow her the measles jab, which was the single one. I asked many times and it was always the same answer. Meanwhile in the same practice I had the HV and nurses going on at me because she hadn't had the jab.

When the MMR came in, same answer. She finally went and got the MMR herself when she was 17. She never contracted measles, mumps or rubella.

DC2 had an adverse reaction to the 3rd of the triple DPT jab. He lost loads of weight, was in and out of hospital and nobody knew what was wrong with him. Medics refused to believe it was down to the jab, despite the timing. To this day I believe he was vaccine damaged.

Despite that I have always been pro vaccine, so all of the DC had all the jabs they were supposed to, at the right time. DC2, 3 and 4 all had MMR when it came out. DC3 caught both mumps and rubella after the jab.

So when DC5 was born and the vaccine schedule was loads earlier I was in a dilemma. In the end she had the DPT jabs on the old schedule, at 3, 4 and 7 months, the Hib/MenC at the correct time, and we paid for the single measles jab when she was 18 months. Despite providing proof of the vaccine to the GP surgery they refused to note it because it wasn't MMR and persisted in sending us reminders. She presumably counted towards the unvaccinated stats.

She had the MMR at 11, prior to starting secondary school. She has never had measles, mumps or rubella in the meantime. We live in an area that had a measles epidemic a few years ago, so presumably herd immunity was low.

At what point would you have prosecuted us for neglect? When DC1 hadn't had the MMR until she was 17? Or would you charge the GP who refused it? When DC5 didn't have it until 11, but did have the single measles shot?

People always had doubts about vaccines, and people always declined them. Every so often there would be an outbreak.

I'm sure loads of people declined the polio vaccine 🤷🏻‍♀️,

It is a largely modern phenomenon because the success of the programme means that people don't fear the diseases anymore.

My father talks about my gran being really worried when he had Measles. Young people have not had that experience because of vaccination

Also, it is incredibly unreasonable to suggest that people should vaccinate their children to protect other people’s. We are each responsible for our own children

Do you have even the vaguest idea about how vaccination works and the concept of herd immunity? 🤷🏼‍♀️

@Teateaandmoretea my mother recalls seeing a story about the dangers of some vaccine the morning she was due to take me for mine, in 1982. It was on something like good morning Britain. That was obviously, nearly 40 years ago so it should
Be no surprise that people don’t have experience of disease and it’s certainly not young people. My mother is in her 70s

Polio was completely out by the 80s because of vaccination, kind of proving the point really.

I don’t know why you keep going on about polio.

What about the children (Roma’s for example) who can’t access health care?! That’s a system failure not neglect!

Because of the fear it caused in the 60s/ children in iron lungs and left handicapped. It was a very very scary illness before it was eradicated by vaccination. So I don't understand why you don't think it is relevant to a thread about the importance of vaccination.

Because I was using an example of vaccination fears in the 80s, experienced by a woman born in the 50s. And you keep
Saying it’s a decent thing because young people don’t know about diseaSe. 70
Isn’t young.

Which vaccines though? Where do you draw the line? I chose not to give mine the flu vaccines as they are not 100% effective and i do not want to risk my children having seazures which can and has happened after vaccines. So am I neglectful for wanting to avoid seazures?

Nice try. This is what you wrote...
It’s like chicken pox, Yes, it can be unpleasant, but CP is not a serious illness. Serious complications happen but they are extremely rare, probably about as rare in fact as complications from MMR are, and yet people play down the complications which can occur due to vaccine damage and talk up the potential complications from chicken pox

Stop digging.

More children die in car accidents than from chicken pox, yet no-one says that parents are irresponsible for driving rather than walking do they?

We would if they didn’t use car seats and seatbelts.

You specifically said that complications from chicken pox are “probably as rare as complications from MMR”. I’ve linked to evidence showing that complications from chicken pox are significantly higher than complications from the MMR.

You also made unfounded statements about “overloading immune systems” which is demonstrably inaccurate.

If you’re going to make such statements in a public forum, statements which might dissuade others from vaccinating their children, you need to back them up. Since you can’t, you’re trying to imply that I’m somehow ignorant. I’m well aware that the MMR doesn’t cover Varicella, despite an MMRV being available, and reduced uptake of MMR is one of the reasons it’s unlikely to be introduced in the U.K.

Posting unsubstantiated rubbish on the internet contributes to that lack of uptake.

@Teateaandmoretea
I'm sure loads of people declined the polio vaccine 🤷🏻‍♀️,

Yes. They did. Read history of the polio vaccine. In its early days, it caused polio- and the resultant paralysis and deaths- quotes

1935 “Kollmer tried a live attenuated virus consisting of a 4% suspension of PV from infected monkey spinal cord, treated with sodium ricinoleate. He used it on monkeys and then on several thousand children. The acute paralysis occurred in about 1/1000 vaccines shortly after administration and some cases were fatal.”

1955 “Shortly after the licensing of Salk vaccine, the failure of inactivation of vaccine virus at Cutter Laboratories, Berkeley, was followed by 260 cases of poliomyelitis with PV type 1 and 10 deaths.”

1980 “In 1980, concentration and purification of polio antigens were introduced into the manufacture of IPV and the immunogenicity of the vaccine was increased. The original IPV contained 20, 2 and 4 D antigen units of PV types 1, 2 and 3. Van Wezel introduced a technology to produce enhanced potency IPV. He decided to concentrate and purify the virus before treatment with formalin. Since this procedure has been introduced, no failure in the inactivation process has been recorded. ”

So, children from 1935 to 1980 were given much more risky polio vaccine. Some died. Took 45yrs to make it safe.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3782271/

Ever heard of BCG vaccine? Vaccine for TB. Used in 60 countries, listed as WHO vaccine. Hundreds of millions vaccinated....but it failed. Especially in India. And people wonder why there is fear and doubt.

Unfortunately due to is and the fall of Saddam Hussein polo is now a real risk to people in the middle east how long until its back in the UK and spreading through the general population thanks manly to antivaxers?
How many will be demanding vaccines for their children then?

@azeema
It didn't fail tb mutated to a new drug resistant strain which the BCG vaccine is not designed for and therefore ineffective against, however the new vaccine works against both strains.
Perhaps you should do a bit more research before you spout just Google Drug Resistant Tuberculosis

That should be I.S not is

It is neglect, and morally and ethically abhorrent.
If children are unvaccinated purely due to parental choice they shouldn’t be allowed in nurseries or schools as they are a risk to others.
Due to parents not vaccinating their children, the area I live in has recently had a surge in measles cases with serious consequences. It’s completely selfish and misguided. What about babies too young to have the vaccine, immunosuppressed children and adults, pregnant women who are not immune, unborn babies? They are all normally protected by herd immunity which is no longer the case once the number of vaccinated children falls below a threshold, which is where we are at now.

@WhentheRabbitsWentWild

i was never vaccinated (apart from one) and I lived to tell the tale .How DARE YOU call parents like mine neglectful because they didn't buy into a hive mind that this forum and this thread appears to have Survival of the fittest somebody upthread said . That's me as I never caught ANYTHING vaccines were meant to avoid . You lot are like witches

The only reason that you never caught anything is because the hive mind' that you are ranting about meant that everyone else did vaccinate their children.

You didn't get those diseases because of herd immunity. Because everyone else was immune and couldn't catch or spread the disease.

You object to your parents being called neglectful. I don't think they were neglectful. I think they were spectacularly, astonishingly selfish.

@Stressedout10
No, the original BCG vaccine (which did fail) did not fail due to TB mutation. Here is why
“Then a baffling picture emerged. The vaccine protected children against TB-meningitis and miliary (disseminated) TB; however, its efficacy in adults against the pulmonary form ranged between 0% and 80%.4 Low or absent protection was observed in Africa and India. An intensive search was launched to find the cause(s)....Years later, genomic studies showed that the various vaccinating strains contained gene deletions and duplications and had variable levels of virulence factors..

So vaccine itself was missing essential pieces of TB DNA needed to make antibodies. Plus

“The failure in India of BCG vaccination was, in part, explained by the extensive exposure of humans to environmental nontuberculous mycobacteria from soil or grass; the mycobacteria caused infection in exposed persons and inhibited the development of an anti-BCG immune response.”

I did not “google” like you say. This is common knowledge in India.

@Stressedout10
Yes, BCG now works...but it took almost 100yrs of failures to get there (first BCG vaccine introduced in 1921).

This and history other vaccines why many people decide to wait and see. Let other people volunteer them and their children to be test subjects.

Vaccines are good, but they are not perfect and some have had decades of failing before success.

So refusing to vaccinate in some cases, say with new vaccines is more caution than neglect.

@Rubicon80
“Because everyone else was immune and couldn't catch or spread the disease.”

This common myth. Immune people can catch disease pathogen and spread it too. They just do not get sick from pathogen. Vaccines do not kill the pathogen, they just make it harmless like any other virus or bacteria that doesn’t make you sick.

Some outbreaks are started by vaccinated person or had the disease so immune person.

@june2007
“Which vaccines though? Where do you draw the line? I chose not to give mine the flu vaccines as they are not 100% effective and i do not want to risk my children having seazures which can and has happened after vaccines”

June make good point here. Who is an anti-vacxer? Person who refuse all vaccines (stupid) and/ or person who pick and choose? Are you pro-vaccine if you skip some like annual flu vaccine?

Annual flu vaccine like blind man telling you how much an elephant weighs by holding its tail. There over million different flu viruses that are in five strains (A-D). Any one can cause flu in human, some strains are more deadly. But annual vaccine is only for 3 or 4 out of over million. It’s gamble with low odds. So is it neglect to not take gamble that is unlikely to provide any immunity?

I’m a children’s nurse and have looked after many babies/infants with measles, meningitis B, whooping cough, TB etc (within the last 5 years) and it’s difficult to see how unwell they are in the knowledge that it could have been prevented.

No matter what a baby/infant is admitted for we have to ask about their immunisation status and although the majority of them are fully vaccinated we do come across parents who say they have not vaccinated their child through choice. Our doctors will spend time with them to talk through the risks of being unvaccinated but it doesn’t change anything as the parents have already done their own research and decided it’s not worth the risk.

A parent cannot be classed as neglectful because they haven’t done something they is optional.

Until vaccines are mandatory then unfortunately nothing can be done. Parents can only be classed as neglectful if they are denying their child something that is classed as essential for the health of their child and societal wellbeing.