Declining 8 week vaccinations for my baby - experiences?

[Plasticpineapple]

I don't want this to be about whether you should or shouldn't vaccinate your baby. I have chosen not to and I'm looking for experiences from others who have done the same. What did you say? What did the doctor say? Did you discuss vaccination once the child was older or flat out decline all vaccines?

x-post LaV

No bumblemummy I don't think you have to get annual flu jabs or you're somehow an 'anti vax' parent. I was answering a question you posed earlier to another poster...you seemed to be suggesting that unless you vax for flu as well you can't say you are fully supportive of vaccines. I'm well aware that the flu jab is based on an annual 'best guess' as to the prevailing strain, and is therefore not always very effective. But I balance that against the risks of no vax at all, and judge the flu vax each year to be worth it.

Sorry Mildred, I confused you with the previous poster who thought that not vaccinating your child should be illegal. I was curious if she included the flu vaccine in that as well. I wasn't suggesting anything about needing to vaccinate against flu to be fully supportive of vaccines.

My question about being anti-vax if you didn't vaccinate against flu was because you said 'as a pro-vac parent you vaccinate against flu every year'.

This year the 'best guess' was particularly off.

LaVolcan, science is how we know that measles causes deafness, or mumps encephalitis causes temporal lobe epilepsy and schitzoid psychosis 30 years later.
its the difference between anecdote and data

We don't yet have 30 years worth of data about MMR in the UK, so who knows what the long term effects are?

The Onion - Measles Outbreak 2015 Timeline.

April 5, 2011: Group of negligent parents decide to start calling themselves “anti-vaxxers”

January 26, 2015: CDC angrily changes answer to “Has measles been eliminated in the United States?” on FAQ page of website

LaVolcan

"Haykult try reading the other thread which is current, where someone absolutely lays into Pagwatch, saying just those sorts of things. (The person responsible for the latest resurrection of this thread.)"

That would be me. I am not going to wind Pag up any further, and have offered an olive branch. Although your observations are characteristically biased and missing inconvenient facts that don't suit your point of view, I am not going to respond to this as I don't think it will help the situation with Pag.

"If you get measles, note that soon after you have gone deaf in one ear, and therefore assume that the measles caused it, why is it not just as valid to assume that if take your child for a jab, and find that they immediately start screaming and regress over the next few weeks, that the jab didn't cause it?How does the first person know that measles caused the deafness, but the second person must assume that the jab didn't cause the adverse reaction?"

Oh my. The reason is really very simple:

• Measles have provable complications, that are explicable, documented and accepted as risks. The research linking the complications have been peer reviewed, and included statistically significant numbers that PROOVE IT. If you reject that; you reject all science and indeed facts in general.

• Your 2nd example has none of the above. It is a simplistic observation that has NO BASIS AT ALL in any research, study or testing.

Measles compilations are based in fact. The jab example you use is based in fiction. Therefore, you accept one, and reject the other by default unless evidence that is repeatable, statistically significant and accepted by the experts is produced the contrary.

Do you dispute this approach?

sanfairyanne: Totally. Put it better than I! ;) I wonder what the reply will be, or will it be ignored as an inconvenient truth?

Bumbly - you asked if I get the flu jab. I do. I am aware it is a best guess as there as so many strains. I still think it's worth getting - can't see the downside.

I trust the NHS to advise me what vaccinations my DCs should get - some people will criticise this I'm sure - but the people who make the vaccination schedule are medical professionals and scientists who have examined all of the evidence and put together the schedule they believe is best for the UK population. I really don't know better than them. I pay for the flu vaccine for myself as I had flu once and it was horrible! I am considering going private for the Men B vaccine as I understand this is getting added to the NHS programme soon and that is an illness that is less common than many but the effects are awful.

My DS was born very prematurely and with an extremely low birth weight. Many very minor illnesses (even just running a temperature) would have severely affected his health as he was so tiny (2lbs at birth; 3lbs when he came home from hospital after a lengthy stay in NICU). He didn't have the extra energy to fight an illness. So we stayed home all of the winter, didn't go to mum/baby groups, didn't socialise with friends with children... In order to avoid him getting any illness. He had his jabs on schedule in order to build his immune system (his inherited immunity ran out on the same timescale as term babies though I did bf (expressing when he was tube fed) to try to give him more of a boost. Maybe that's why I feel so strongly about this subject. An illness which is usually mild in childhood can be extremely serious for a child with a poor immune system or low base health. Admittedly we were avoiding things like the common cold and RSV that either don't have vaccinations available or aren't commonly vaccinated against, but my point here is that many illnesses, that you don't perceive as severe, can be severe for some people. The way I think - yes there may be a low probability of getting x illness really badly, but the effects of getting it "really badly" could be death/lifelong disability. So let's do everything we can to reduce the likelihood of anyone getting sick in the first place!

No doubt the response to this will be "but you vaccinated your child so why were you worried" - well I was worried because my understanding is that in an individual child the vaccine may not take, but vaccinating the whole population reduces the number of people who get sick (that's my noddy description of herd immunity). So, protecting my son requires me to vaccinate him and all of you to vaccinate your children too.

So to summarise:

• please vaccinate your children
• be reassured that the vaccination schedule is put together by scientists who review evidence to assess effectiveness of vaccines and consider many factors in the timing (eg I don't know why they vaccinate against Rubella so early... But I'm sure it's not just for fun).

Finally Bumbly - if you're not antivaccination why on earth are you making all these comments? In my opinion not vaccinating children is very dangerous so I think it is rather irresponsible to write posts that encourage that behaviour, and if you don't actually believe what you are writing that seems rather weird! Are you a research scientist in this field?

We don't have 27 years of data. We introduced one form of mumps vaccine which was then withdrawn. We can't compare US data to our own unless the vaccine schedules are the same, which to my knowledge they are not.

So at best we have about 20 ish years of data. Who has looked at the children who claim to be vaccine damaged and really tried to analyse it and look for causes?

Could we boil this down to the following question:-

Would you like to:-
(A) reduce the risk of your child getting sick by following a programme of vaccinations designed by scientists who have based their decision on evidence from thousands of scientific studies?

Or would you:-
(B) prefer to go with your own research?

Urm... I'm going with A. I spend too much time on Mumsnet to read all the papers the scientists read.

I go with A too, SparklyOctopus. Nice name - love a sparkly octopus.

Personally, I think this board is disproportionately full of the anti-vaxxer type - and most sensible types don't bother to post here. Same names, who will argue, argue, argue. And think that if they 'win' the thread by getting some sort of last word in, means that vaccines really either don't work/aren't safe/the diseases aren't really that serious/ etc etc blah...

Vaccinate your kids, folks.

sad though I am at the prospect of the anti-vaccine community eventually removing themselves from the gene-pool through infections disease (and unfortunately taking some of the pro-vaccine but vulnerable with them), it's an excellent example of Darwinian theory.

LaVolcan:

What's up, cat got your tongue? You are posting on this thread? Or is the question too hard to answer?

SilenceInTheLibrary:

Agreed. It's about time us sensible types started showing up the anti-vaxxers for what they are. Lets try some science and facts on them shall we? So funny how they think they are being clever by not actually saying 'don't vaccinate', just dropping hints all over the place. They should run for parliament.

howtodrainyourflagon:

Good observation, but the problem is that their hare-brained quackery will also take out some poor innocent souls as collateral damage on the way. Like children with cancer, or people living with HIV for example.

Of course, the other collateral damage in the vaccine debate is the people who actually die of the diseases and they were, at one time, so numerous that the vaccines were developed and rolled out in the first place.

"Finally Bumbly - if you're not antivaccination why on earth are you making all these comments? In my opinion not vaccinating children is very dangerous so I think it is rather irresponsible to write posts that encourage that behaviour, and if you don't actually believe what you are writing that seems rather weird! Are you a research scientist in this field?"

Ah, but Bumbley is not encouraging anything by posting oblique references, and hints for people to 'read between the lines'. And you can't prove it! This just seems to be how it is done. Try and point out that these endless posts, emotion charged phrases and hysterical references have an effect, and you get both barrels:

• I am not an anti-vaxxer.
• At no point have I directly said anything of the sort (I just hint a lot).
• I am just contributing a debate, (In which I hint a lot) which is my right.

It reminds me of some anti-abortion organisations I have heard of, masquerading as 'information centres'. As DidThatJustHappen said, are you an anti-vaxxer or not? If not, do you accept that sowing seeds of doubt in people's minds about something this important is unacceptable behaviour?

Bumbley's anti-abortion too, vlad. The baby in the womb takes all precedence - except when it comes to their protection via the rubella vaccine it seems. Strange that.

But you're not allowed to bring other threads into the argument, you know, even though the other vax thread was brought in here to criticise/shame you

Rubella's 'mild' you know.

Unless you're a pregnant woman.

OP, I am worried by your post. Please sit down and discuss all this with your doctor with an open mind.

My parents made an informed decision not to vaccinate my younger sister for one particular vaccine (this was the 1970s). They sought to ensure this was clearly marked in her notes and the reasons why (which included a hospital consultant's view that in her particular case it was a balanced decision of risks and benefits and no definite right answer on the basis of the current knowledge, although the consultant leaned towards vaccination). She had that injection about a decade later when brought up by the GP, who had seen the marking in her notes and the reasons, when that knowledge base and her individual risks were better known, and as a young teenager she was involved by my parents in the discussions. That is how informed immunisation debates should be conducted but for most of the time for most of us it is a no-brainer to have them.

I also think it was a conversation my parents were able to have because their stance discrimanted between different vaccines, because my sister had individual characteristics which indicated a raised risk level, and because they genuinely engaged on the basis of evidence and risk with the professionals advising them. I had the injection; my sister, with her specific allergies and sensitivities to relevant ingreidients, did not.

SilenceInTheLibrary Fri 27-Feb-15 22:33:22

Of course, the other collateral damage in the vaccine debate is the people who actually die of the diseases and they were, at one time, so numerous that the vaccines were developed and rolled out in the first place.

True indeed. But I heard that the virtual eradication of these diseases was actually nothing to do with vaccines at all; but actually due to improvements in hygiene! It seems that Vaccines are a gigantic conspiracy designed to, er, um, er, well conspire to do something against us anyway. It's a good job we are all being made aware of this complex, world-wide, multi-generational conspiracy to fill our children up with too much aluminium, and germs! The internet gives a voice to everyone, even those with diagnosable mental health conditions.

How silly of me, vlad. It's water and a good diet that eradicated smallpox of course. Not vaccines. Not health workers travelling to the far flung reaches of Africa/Asia and so on to administer the vaccine.

Eradication of Smallpox according to the WHO

Yup. It's hugely, largely, vaccination.

SilenceInTheLibrary

"Bumbley's anti-abortion too, vlad. The baby in the womb takes all precedence - except when it comes to their protection via the rubella vaccine it seems. Strange that."

Oh, I was not aware of that.

"But you're not allowed to bring other threads into the argument, you know, even though the other vax thread was brought in here to criticise/shame you"

To be fair, I brought the other thread in first of all, but thanks for the thought. I am not feeling criticised or shamed; mainly I am feeling very satisfied with the fact that the people who argued have STILL yet to come up reasoned arguments or rebuttals against the science and facts behind this issue. Neither have they replied to the criticisms levelled at them at the weasel way some of them try to influence people with their crackpot quackery views, nor can they come up with any rebuttal to my (and others) answer as to why one accepts measles complications as fact without question, but would reject observations based on nothing at all but coincidence without question. Simple answer to the questions posted by both Bumbly and LaVolcan, yet silence. Perhaps they went off the bed? I am being impatient - I will shut up now..... ;)

That's fair, vlad.