What can you do about parents who won't vaccinate

[mirandatempest]

I've discovered that three of my friends have not vaccinated their children. I am normally very live and let live but this has really upset and bothered me. I've challenged them all but very gently as I
am useless at confrontation but can these friendships survive? I feel so angry.

Get a copy of your GP records

According to mine I got my first vaccination in 2015 whilst pregnant with dc1. That's not correct. Currently trying to find somewhere in a reasonable distance that has the mmr as my GP practice won't give it to me.

If you've moved around a lot the GP records advice is pretty useless.
I don't have any idea what GPs I may have been registered with as a baby, and I had lived in six different cities and four countries by my 7th birthday...

Also vaccinations used to be done at baby clinics independent from GPs.

*I can't remember it all.

But basically anti vaxxers only exist in predominantly white counties.

3rd world countries don't get to be anti vax. They're kids just die of rampant preventable diseases.

It was really eloquent and thought provoking. I've just butchered it.*

I'd class it more as Western priviledge than white priviledge, seeing as all children have access to vaccinations in the West, regardless of their heritage, but it is a good point.

I think it's complete ingratitude of of waht we have.

That makes sense. Thank you!

DS1's vaccinations were recorded in his red book. When we moved abroad the doctor copied them all into the international "immunisation passport" which is more standard, and much easier to keep as its just a little yellow booklet. I keep it with our other paperwork. DS2 has a pocket for his Impfpass in his child health record book.

This bashing of parents who choose not to vaccinate has really gone too far. How many children have caught a disease from an unvaccinated child? Where is the evidence that this is a risk?

I'm tired of being told how safe vaccines are and the scoffing at people who do their own research is particularly grim. A quick google shows the billions of fines some of these companies have racked up with some being criminally prosecuted.

If you want to trust a pharmaceutical company like Glaxosmithkiline, that's up to you. Other people don't want to deal with a company who have repeatedly been fined billions for fraud, bribery and harming people.

Nobody would buy a car from a company with this track record. I wouldn't buy cat food from them. That's my choice. Knock it off with the scoffing. The harm caused by this company and others like it is not some sort of conspiracy, it's a fact.

www.policymed.com/2014/06/gsk-settles-for-105-million-under-state-consumer-protection-laws-agrees-to-unprecedented-compliance-provisions-through-2019.html

This bashing of parents who choose not to vaccinate has really gone too far. How many children have caught a disease from an unvaccinated child? Where is the evidence that this is a risk?

Plenty of children in countries where vaccination is not easily available have died, as they infect each other.

As someone said upthread, anti-vaccers in the UK are freeloading on the backs of those who vaccinate.

How many children have caught a disease from an unvaccinated child?

An unvaccinated child brought whooping cough to my dcs’ nursery.

I'm tired of being told how safe vaccines are and the scoffing at people who do their own research is particularly grim. A quick google shows the billions of fines some of these companies have racked up with some being criminally prosecuted.

I wouldn't be concerned about myself or my own children, but I would really worry about their children, and the risk of them catching a terrible disease. I find it shocking, like any other kind of neglect.

@Roguesausage "How many children have caught a disease from an unvaccinated child? "

413,308 people caught measles from an unvaccinated person in the year to 5 November 2019. Where else do you think they'd catch it?

@Roguesausage
It would take a few minutes to get the WHO figures, but we can easily tell how many preventable diseases are caught from unvaccinated people yearly. Would you like me to PM you?

www.who.int/data

The WHO also rank anti-vaxx attitudes and vaccine hesitancy as one of their top ten threats to global health.

@TheEponymousGrub...vaccinated people can catch a disease too I live in wales where we had a measles outbreak a few years ago. Of the 10-15 kids I know who had it, every single one had been vaccinated at some point. Vaccines wear off, the dont always work, etc etc. So to say that every single person who caught it came from an unvaccinated person is nonsense.

Roguesausage
How many children have caught a disease from an unvaccinated child? Where is the evidence that this is a risk?

There is plenty of evidence that infectious diseases are infectious and that there is a risk that people will catch them from anyone who is carrying them. That is how infectious diseases work.

And it is not just other children who will be infected by an unvaccinated child who is infectious with a disease such as measles. It is also those who are immunocompromised; for instance those who are having chemotherapy for cancer. How peachy for them, as they struggle with the effects of chemotherapy, to have to deal with having measles as well.

I feel myself that one child under a year old (when the MMR is administered routinely, and before which a baby is at risk of catching the disease) catching measles from an anti-vaxxer's child and being left with impaired sight as a result is one child too many. I don't know how you might feel about this: presumably the risk of impaired sight caused by measles is the same for an unvaccinated child with the disease, and personally I am glad my children have adequate eyesight, but you might think near-blindness or blindness better than having a vaccination which whatever you think of Big Pharma has caused bugger all blindness since it came into use in 1962. (Oh, and neither anti-depressant drugs nor anti-asthma drugs are vaccinations, so those are entirely irrelevant to the matter.) To throw a question back to you: do you know any child or adult who was blinded or near-blinded by having the measles vaccine? Or come to that, the MMR?

The reason that smallpox no longer kills and disfigures hundreds of thousands of people worldwide is that a vaccination programme was introduced and used against it, and it is no longer a risk because nobody in the world has it any more. On the whole, I am in favour of this. But because of failure to vaccinate in that war-torn country, in 2019 4,500 people died of measles in the Democratic Republic of Congo -- considerably more than died of ebola. Had they been vaccinated, it is unlikely that they would have died of that disease, though they might have died as a result of the war or of some other disease or of simple starvation.

To throw a question back to you: do you know any child or adult who was blinded or near-blinded by having the measles vaccine? Or come to that, the MMR?

No, but I do have two children with vaccine damage in other ways.
I fully understand that vaccines prevent diseases that can have horrible effects, but we also have to acknowledge that vaccine damage exists or it just invalidates any discussion on the topic. If there was no risk associated with vaccines, then it wouldn’t be such a contentious topic.

@OwlBeThere
Ok I take your point that vaccines don't all immediately give complete and permanent protection. But most people who catch measles won't have been vaccinated. I think your example (all the measles cases you know, being vaccinated kids) must be - let me be diplomatic - a very atypical sample.

Also, I have to say it: the reason there would be a measles outbreak in Wales is that enough people have declined vaccination to spoil the herd immunity that protects people who cannot take the vaccine.

OwlBeThere it would though. People used to believe that the smallpox vaccination would make people become cow like because it was developed from cowpox originally.

media.britishmuseum.org/media/Repository/Documents/2014_9/29_16/a484bac2_9217_4e68_a59f_a3b5011796fa/mid_00146958_001.jpg

*In some countries children aren't allowed into school if they are unvaccinated because of parental stupidity rather than a sound medical reason verified by a doctor.

Same should happen here. Selfish aresholes*

I agree.

If everyone took the same attitude as these pillocks we'd still have smallpox and polio wouldn't be confined to limited outbreaks in a few countries in Asia and Africa.

Being old, I can remember families who'd lost children to measles and children who were disabled as a result of mothers getting rubella in pregnancy. We have the power to prevent that happening ever again and it's simply selfish not to take it imo.

If you have autistic children, do you also have real evidence (as opposed to Wakefield) that a vaccine was causal? That is a serious question.

I would be very interested to know the incidence of autism among children who had not been vaccinated in 1998, but we lacked a control group in a population of whom 91.8% had been vaccinated against measles. Naturally ten of the twelve children with autistic symptoms whom Wakefield tested for MMR in their bloodstreams were likely to have had the MMR innoculation: it's one of the most useless bits of "research" I have encountered. They had probably also (and provably) drunk milk, but that doesn't mean that milk causes autism. (as far as we know or have reason to think.)

Yes, vaccine damage certainly does exist; for instance 200 children suffered badly from adverse reactions to an early polio vaccine in the fifties (and parents still queued up to get their children vaccinated, because they had seen what polio does and wanted their children not to get it). But Wakefield is not evidence for it. And the lack of a rise in autism in other countries where measles vaccination was routine in the eighties and nineties does seem to indicate that a link between the two is not proven even if one does not pay any attention to him at all and only looks at other sources.

But this looks fairly thoroughly at vaccines and conditions which might be associated with them: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24624471/

I am not about to read the whole paper (other things to do with my life; it is long) nor can I vouch for the authors of everything cited in it. It does seem to conclude, though, that "while no vaccine is 100 percent safe, very few adverse events are shown to be caused by vaccines" and that "the evidence shows that vaccines do not cause several conditions. For example, the MMR vaccine is not associated with autism or childhood diabetes."

Attitudes to this issue have massively changed over the last twenty years.

Anti vaccine used to be a very hippie liberal stance. Now it has become associated with the right. That will be partly why kids of hippie parents are choosing to get vaccinated.

I was going to put up a link to some photos of people with smallpox but they're pretty awful so I won't. I wonder if anti vaxxers are thus because they've never had to live in a time or place where easily preventable diseases are rife?

My Mum (in her 90s) was telling us about being in a fever hospital for weeks when she was young, no visits from her parents, having to share a hospital bed with another child who passed on nits , how the sister of her best friend died of diphtheria. And how they were all so thankful when vaccines were rolled out in the 1940s. We don't know how lucky we are to have safe, effective vaccines.

Polio is on the rise in Pakistan and Afghanistan - it had almost been eradicated worldwide, but it's spreading. Having seen the way that Covid has spread across the world, how quickly do you think we'll start seeing polio cases in Europe?

Anti vaxxers annoy the hell out of me. Yes, they can all quote cases where someone has had a reaction to a vaccine, all quote cases of big pharma being out to get us, for FGS just realise how incredibly lucky we have been to live in the west in the 20th/21st century and not have to watch our children become seriously ill and die of what are now, entirely preventable diseases.

And if you think not vaccinating your children isn't dangerous, just have a look at what happened in Samoa in 2019.

If everyone took the same attitude as these pillocks we'd still have smallpox and polio wouldn't be confined to limited outbreaks in a few countries in Asia and Africa.

That's true. Not to mention diphtheria and TB, which used to kill millions.

Yes, there will be some people who have a bad reaction to vaccines, and others who for medical reasons are exempt. But this is the case with any medical treatment.

Those who have genuine medical reasons for not being able to cope with vaccines, and babies who aren't old enough, need the rest of us to take the vaccines to keep them safe. Not doing so with no medical reason really does appear to be very selfish.

And, as others have said, this is very much only an issue for people in the western world, where, thanks to vaccination programmes, we don't regularly face the risk of fatal illnesses. (Hence the hysteria over Covid. It really is a risk to vulnerable people and can spread rapidly, but some proportion is needed.)

There is a reason for people in Afghanistan not getting their children vaccinated and medical aid workers involved in the vaccination programme being killed, quite apart from the chaos caused by Covid -- 50 million children were left without a polio vaccine as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Taliban and other terrorist organisations are aware that the CIA used the vaccination programme in their hunt for Osama bin Laden, taking blood samples to try to locate him. They therefore sometimes oppose the programme, violently. If it is a choice between your whole family being killed or one of your children perhaps getting polio, you are likely to choose the risk to one child.

Also, apparently vaccination is anti-Islamic and nowhere mentioned favourably in the Quran.

AskingQuestions, absolutely, all those reasons. And it shows how quickly polio can get out of hand when a vaccination programme is disrupted.