Why so many anti-vaxxing mums

[FirstTimeMum881]

I have a 5 month old baby and I'm going back to work at 7.5 months and planning on pumping milk at work. I was looking for tips so I joined some Facebook groups on breastfeeding and pumping and also made an account on babycenter as it had a lot of threads on the subject. OH MY GOD. They may as well rename these groups "Batshit mums against vaccines" because the content is insane. My favourite is a mum of a preemie refusing donor milk from vaccinated mothers. Lots of others paranoid their babies have autism because they had their 8 week jabs and they noticed their babies love staring at the ceiling.

I'm aware most of these women are in the US but what the hell is going on??? It's like i stepped into a parallel universe.

Ah but "modern medicine ". Which is true (if a little ironic) up to a point. But when your city has only 4 picu beds and your child is the fifth one needing them (and in a widespread outbreak of, say, measles this could easily happen) then your kid's in big trouble.

People don't see the cemeteries with half your great grandmother's kids dead before 5 years old because of now preventable childhood diseases. Their neighbors aren't disabled due to polio. They don't hear the neighbor's kid whooping and see them carted off in the ambulance. They don't see units filled with little babies on vents with RSV who will have problems for years to come if they survive. They've never seen a case of congenital rubella syndrome.

They rely on herd immunity.

They don't think it will happen to their kids until it does.

You should probably stop claiming to read minds and to know as much as you say you do about the thought other people put into their decisions.

You'd find it all far less baffling if you started giving other people credit for their intelligence.

Agreed. One of my NCT 'friends' was anti-vax and it made me so cross as I felt that the only reason she had the luxury of choosing not to vaccinate was because the majority of people did vaccinate and so there's some herd immunity

Like with so many things, people make the decision to put their trust into the qualified medical experts who recommend vaccinations.

As opposed to social media idiots like Jenny McCartney.

And you should care if other people vaccinate because all those people are contributing to herd immunity which protects YOUR kids from getting sick from entirely preventable conditions.

Because some people are dumb enough to believe social media over science.

Mothers who refuse to vaccinate their children are usually motivated by the same things that motivate mothers who do vaccinate. They believe they are doing the best they can to protect their children. They have formed an opinion and it is difficult to get them to change their minds.

But it is really important to remember that the vast majority of unvaccinated children in the UK are unvaccinated because their parents have a disorganised life style.This means that they do not get round to attending the many necessary appointments. There is no ideology behind this. Just poor parenting. If you want to increase vaccine take up these are the families you have to target.

The study had some obvious (to me) flaws, but if you're a complete novice at reading medical research you could easily be sucked in

Yes. There are numerous low quality studies found in pay-to-publish medical journals and you'll run across them when googling any disease/medical condition. Legitimate doctors may have conducted the study, but they are not held to the rigorous standards required by the BMJ or NEJM etc.

Laypeople trying to interpret medical studies generally results in a lot of misunderstanding.

My mum accidentally missed my whooping cough vaccine in the late 1950s.
i caught it when i was 13 and almost died. It left me with a lifelong lung disorder which made life less pleasant than it should have been. My mum never forgave herself.

it’s individual choice but if you compare child health pre and post vaccine it does tell quite a story. I don’t understand why anyone would want to take us back to those times.

@ThejoyofNC

You will care about other people's decisions to vaccinate when there's a measles or whooping cough or flu outbreak in your locality and your child falls ill.

Your stance is profoundly selfish. You're piggybacking on other people's thoughtful conscientiousness.

You can't get autism if you die from polio. Makes sense?

What do you actually object to in vaccines?

I just wanted to mention that there is a really excellent piece by James Marriott in today's Times which addresses this issue.

www.thetimes.com/article/b3bbc99e-e2dc-480e-92fc-bbd7c7c3abc0?shareToken=fd55677f5812279a8b4157e2f3446abb

I haven't added a link before so don't know if this will work. But if you can access it, it's worth reading

Haha I miss the breastfeeding group madness, it’s full of totally batshit women

I've not encountered any anti-vax sentiment in everyday life, in the parents I've known through 2 dcs. Nobody really discusses it except to mention vaccination appointments or reactions, it's taken for granted that we all vax and it's a normal thing to do (and most parents do the chicken pox vax by choice too). Most families we know are liberal, professional, and highly educated, which is a demographic which tends have high vax rates.

To be clear- I'm not on social media and have no clue who that is.

I'm not part of any anti-vax groups or movements. I don't think they should be banned nor do I believe conspiracy theories.

Privilege. Plain and simple.

The privilege of others having had the vaccines.
The privilege of not seeing the destruction these illnesses can have.
The privilege of modern medicine.

No, you do care. Because it's the fact that most people, like me, do vaccinate our kids, that allows you the luxury of making your incredibly foolish and selfish choice while still (for the moment) keeping your kids' risk of dying from preventable disease fairly low.

You're welcome.

So why are you anti-vax then?

I used to be a carer for a gentleman who missed out on the first polio vaccine by just a few months. He caught polio in the 1950s. Nearly died and spent the entire rest of his life paralysed from the neck down with an artificial respirator attached to his chest which made him inhale and exhale by an alternating vacuum. He was a remarkable man, spent 50+ years of his life living like this. Insane anti vaxxers should try and explain their rationale to him.

There have always been these people around. But social media means they gather together and it makes them seem more numerous that they are.

But you are relying on the majority choosing to vaccinate, because that is what is going to keep your unvaccinated child safe - herd immunity.
So it's not quite true you don't care, is it?

Did you not even give the tetanus vaccine to your kids?

My sis in law is a bit like this, i dunno if she vaccinated her children or not, but she comes out with all the crap ah you don't know what's in it blah blah. I usually shut her down with oh and you got your medical degree from where ?? Her interference has caused her own mother to delay the flue injection as well as another injection she should get every year to help her walk - Consultant gave out to her last time she was in for delaying it , basically said it was her own fault she in pain as she needs the injection. Luckily my side of the family have common sense and don't preach that they know better than the scientists, medics and years of research. They have all got the chicken pox one too which i think is a brilliant one to get. I work for a large pharma company, we make a very specialised life saving drug and every so often there are presentations with people we have helped, to know have helped even if only a small bit in changing that persons life is rewarding. There are so brain boxes of chemist working on stuff for years that can really help us in the future. Why do people think they no better than the facts Its mind boggling and down right stupid

Because we don’t learn, history is just on a cycle of repeat…