Genuine question for anti-vaxxers

[Raisinmeup]

I see a lot online about anti-vaxxers and I’m trying to understand where they’re coming from, so this is a genuine question, not rage bait.

My understanding is that some parents choose not to vaccinate their children because they believe vaccines cause harmful side effects, or they just don’t trust the government and big pharma in general.

But what’s the alternative? If everyone stopped vaccinating, wouldn’t we start seeing diseases like polio coming back? That would mean more infant deaths and lifelong disabilities. It just doesn’t seem like a rational trade off?

From what I’ve seen, there seems to be a belief that immune systems can deal with these illnesses naturally, but I wonder if part of that belief comes from the fact that parents of today haven’t actually seen what a world without vaccines looks like. We’ve grown up in a time where infant death from preventable diseases is almost unheard of, so maybe it’s easy to forget how serious these infections really are.

And lastly, if you haven’t vaccinated your child and they then catch one of these illnesses, do you not end up turning to the same big pharma for the medicine or treatment anyway?

Your treatment was "off label". Does that mean it was not a tried and tested drug for your symptoms? If so, why was it given to you?

I went to a surgeons museum in Edinburgh, great place for seeing medical equipment from throughout the ages and lots of things in jars but there were some things that never left me such as images and paintings of people wild eyed with pain and terror during a tetanus spasm that's contorting their entire bodies!
These are illnesses that you would have to be a total bastard to put your kids through whilst you sit back with your luxury protection because your parents didn't join tin foil cults! Nobody had an issue with jabs until the cult instructed them to!

I used to work near a graveyard once that I used to walk around sometimes on my lunch hour, it was a very old graveyard and had a lot of children buried in it, many graves had multiple siblings in it because the diseases swept through entire families, many adults were lucky if they lived through their 30"s! That's the dark legacy that gets left, the anti vaxxers kids that don't die in childhood could become like the people that died early in adulthood, they carry on the legacy from Granny & Grandad Anti vax and generations are born where the premature death rate is high! How do you sleep at night knowing you are volunteering your kids to vicious illnesses that you are protected from!

Even some of the milder complications are things like infertility! That's going to be a good conversation when these kids grow up passionately wanting a family & having to deal with the fact that their parents were responsible for voluntarily removing their infertility! Do these anti vaxxers think of the hate and disownment they've got coming if they voluntarily give their kids long term health issues that dog them for the rest of their life!

All the diseases that are vaccinated against in UK were and could be a big deal here. Have you seen an adult who cannot walk because of polio? Seen someone die of diptheria? A person brain damaged, blind or deaf because of measles? Whooping cough kills as do most other diseases preventable by vaccination. Personally, I have a chicken pox scar in my left eye, which makes the sight quite bad.

When my hospital (where I work) was giving Covid vaccinations I read up on the Pfizer one. On the data sheet it had an ingredient that stated: not for human or veterinary use.
I tried to query this at work but was basically told by my boss to ‘have the blooming thing and stop worrying about it’! I ended up having 2 Astra Zenika ones or get the sack ,but I didn’t want any because I didn’t believe they could possibly have been tested adequately.

This explains it

https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.339C8FB

You are generations away from those days but I grew up in those days and children did not routinely die from measles. All children got measles when I was young and I never even heard of anyone being harmed, though there must have been some rare cases

It was an antipsychotic drug that injured me but I do think it is used off label for severe distress and anxiety (and mine was caused by a head injury and post concussion syndrome symptoms, which had become extremely severe over a number of months).

Technically I guess you could probably argue that the antipsychotic drug was tested for distress that is a symptom of psychosis, but i as I wasn't psychotic, it's not quite relevant 😳🤔

Interesting you mentioned tetanus and the severe spasms (back arching)... ironically the antipsychotic drug that injured me caused exactly the same symptoms as part of the adverse effects it was having (it was an acute dystonic reaction and opithotonus was one if the same symptoms).

Having said that, I probably would get a tetanus vaccination as I would hate to have that symptom as part of an illness too.😳😢

For anyone unvaccinated let me tell you about a child I saw last week in my hospital.

She was born full term. No time in NICU. Parents a bit odd and didn't get her vaccinated.

At age 3 she contacted an infection. A bad strain. She ended up in ICU as she couldn't breathe. She was then paralysed from the neck down.

She is now 12 and is still paralysed from the neck down and still has a Trachestomy in place.

I don't care what you do with your body but your child doesn't have a say and should be fully vaccinated. This child's life was destroyed by her selfish and ignorant parents.

What infection did she contract?

It’s been on the U.K. vaccine schedule for boys since 2019. Obviously, in having the vaccine if you are exposed then you are protected.

Because there's two types of measles, when I was a kid yes, German measles used to circulated is a much milder disease than the variant we were vaccinated for - plus would it have been as mild if we hadn't been vaccinated! The myth that these disease are mild needs to stop, we weren't exposed to worst version of measles because we were jabbed!

German measles is Rubella, the R in MMR.

Measles and German measles are totally different diseases. As a PP said GM is rubella.

And although rubella is normally a mild childhood disease it can be devastating for an unborn child.

My mother was pregnant with me, had been visiting a relative with a young child the the next day developed rubella.

Fortunately as it was a family member my mum knew she had been exposed, her only option was injections of gamma globulin.

There was no ultrasound then so she had to wait until I was born to find out if I would be born disabled.

Measles (the first M in the MMR) vaccine is a horrible illness. The daughter of a friend of my mother's was born in the early 1960s. A bright healthy girl from an affluent family (ie she had everything to eat she needed and a warm home etc etc). She contracted measles aged 3 and sadly developed encephalitis, a not uncommon associated condition. She was left with brain damage and has had to be cared for her entire life. Children regularly died of this illness in the past. Many people today don't know this because we are so fortunate here in the UK to have been shielded from it thanks to vaccinations introduced in late 1960s. This useful website run by the University of Oxford gives all the facts and figures about different vaccinations in clear and simple language. Please read if you are in any doubt.
vaccineknowledge.ox.ac.uk/mmr-vaccine#Key-vaccine-facts

It annoys me when people claim that our parents had measles parties which just isn't true, I can remember mums being twitchy in my 80's childhood when GM was about and keeping kids away from other kids when they had it.

You are influenced by social media though - that’s where all the nonsense comes from. It can’t be from evidence based scientific research or you would have come to the opposite conclusion.

A few years back, I had tetanus, diphtheria, polio, typhoid and yellow fever jabs all in one afternoon and had no ill effect! There's no justification for risking lives over jabs that have been safe for many generations!

I wouldn't call my self anti-vaccine. But the wide introduction of vaccines coincided with various other public health improvements (public sanitation, personal hygiene, NHS, nutrition,....) so it may be that they get more credit than they are truly deserve (but I am not saying that they don't deserve any).

To say this is to not understand vaccination — no amount of improved sanitation can completely eradicate a virus (if anything, viruses are much more transmissible in the modern world). Only vaccination can do that, by creating herd immunity and this removing the viral reservoir (the places where the virus circulates).

Improved sanitation and living standards haven’t eradicated viruses for which we don’t have vaccines, have they?

And yet, here you are

It was true of my childhood! Our local GP encouraged kids to play together if anyone had German measles (as long as no mothers were pregnant!), so that we would all catch it young, and get it over and done with. He used to ring us up if he knew of a case. He was particularly keen for girls to catch it, so that they needn't worry about infection later in life when pregnant. I think it was fairly common in the 1960s, because there was no way to prevent rubella except through natural immunity. It was like an unexploded grenade, we tried our best to control how it affected our lives rather than just letting it circulate unpredictably and reach vulnerable pregnant women. It's wonderful that vaccination now offers protection.

The covid jab isn't offered anymore where I am. If I was lucky enough to be pregnant anywhere between 2020 and 2021 and I was offered it, I wouldn't have taken it then, either. They said it was safe, but it was rushed through and I don't trust it. On the other hand, the flu jab has been around for donkey's moons and I trust that.

It was more a chicken pox party thing in the 80's but ultimately people need to understand what we were exposed to as kids wasn't a potentially very serious illness without being jabbed.