Refusing to vaccinate

[popsadaisy]

I went to vaccinate my one year old yesterday and I was so surprised when the nurse told me that some parents still refuse vaccinations. I am genuinely intrigued as to why this is?

cantpissinpeace, what do you mean that you have no responsibility to random pregnant women? What you are saying is, I don't give a shit about the rest of society as long as me and mine are okay.

That is utterly selfish.

Never mind stupid and ignorant for reasons PP have given.

There was a programme one R4 about this earlier in the week. The whole ‘herd’ thing was very interesting. Measles is 9x more contagious than Ebola. People have forgotten how hideous these diseases were and there is so much twaddle peddled on social media by antivaxers.

@cantpissinpeace but your daughter is somebody else's random woman. Surely you can see that

What about a tetanus shot - do people merrily shun this too? Another absolute lifesaver. Do they still give polio shots?

Only ever known one person who wouldn’t vaccinate, against anything. It’s odd, she seemed perfectly average when we met at a toddler group. The kids got on ok, we met up a few times and at each meeting she expressed odder and offer views about all manner of things.
Eventually she mentioned her son hadn’t been vaccinated and from what sense I could make, if any, of what she was saying it seemed she basically believed there was an huge state wide conspiracy, perpetrated by all public institutions, to control the population. She genuinely seemed to believe that our minds were being controlled through the vaccine programme.
We didn’t meet up again 🤪

I heartily agree with absolutely everything @SoWhyDontYouKillMe has said.

I met a woman at a baby group who seemed really nice and very sensible. She declared that she wouldn't be vaccinating her dc because of 'the risk' but would instead rely on the herd immunity. I was left thinking, why is her child too precious to expose to 'the risk', but mine was somehow less precious and could therefore take 'the risk' to protect hers. It coloured my thinking about her, which was a shame, because i think other than this issue, she was very nice.

The herd immunity only works if people are immunised - I think it is 90% for it to be effective.

So all those idiots believing that their precious child is more valuable than all other kids on the planet (and that they love their kids more than other parents) are fools. Deluded fools.

I’d be really pissed off with my parents as soon as I was old enough to realise they hadn’t had me vaccinated. Luckily my parents weren’t morons though!

I can understand why people get upset about this, but the reason why people choose not to vaccinate their children is fear.

Addressing them with aggression and contempt will not change that fear, but will entrench it further. There needs to be much more work done around engaging with vaccine refusers in a way that will make them more likely to see the benefits, and be able to put the risks of vaccinating into context.

I don't think it helps much that the medical profession seem unable to predict which children will react badly and which won't. The average GP will not be able to weigh up the risks to a child whose parents have certain more unusual medical conditions. I fall into this camp. I did vaccinate my child, but it was with some trepidation, based on my own medical history, not generic scaremongering. The HCPs I tried to get advice from either rushed to close me down, with a rather patronising manner, or had the honesty to admit their ignorance, but still had no answers for me. Nobody could quantify the actual risk for me.

I think it is also a problem that so many vaccines are bundled together, and that it is difficult or impossible to get separate vaccines to vaccinate across a longer schedule. It can also be a hard sell to persuade people they need to subject their child to a vaccination against an illness they have virtually no chance of catching, like polio. I understand the arguments for the bundling (my own DD has had all hers in the standard NHS schedule), but I wonder if the govt has taken the right tack in ploughing on with such a hard-line stance on this. I wonder if more would have had a measles vaccination, for example, if it was available separately.

It's a very thorny, but also a very important, issue. It deserves to be tackled in the most effective way, rather than be an occasion for insults and contempt.

I think MN should delete anti vax threads

Cantpiss - unfortunately your own dd's offspring will be at risk now. As a pp said once she's pregnant it's too late for the vax. She may well be someone that gets pregnancy unexpectedly. She may well also reasonably assume she is vaccinated and not realise she needs to sort that out before trying.

And that fear is whipped up by social media Tolleshunt. The MMR has been proved safe.

@Tolleshunt you raise some very interesting and thought provoking points. And I must admit it is overwhelming when your tiny baby has to have four vaccines all at once. My LG reacted badly to her first vaccines at 8 weeks it terrified me being a new mum but I do know that she is better to have them and have the not so nice side effects than to not have them and risk catching meningitis/measles/MMR etc.

@Tolleshunt

I completly agree with what you said. I must admit that when I had each of my children vaccinated, I was nervous. There was that little voice telling me, is this the right thing, what if the sceptics are right.

But I put my trust in thr NHS. Both my children are fully vaccinated.

Plus the way I see it is, most these conspiracies come from the USA where illness is big business. Here we're trying to reduce use of the NHS because it's government funded. So why would the NHS try and make us ill.

It does make me laugh that people think they can avoid thr vaccine because herd immunity will protect their kids. What if we all think like that. Which leads us to the issue we have now where we're losing herd immunity.

It makes me so angry. These people aren’t fit to be parents.

When I have children I'll be vaccinating against everything if they are able to.

People always talk about the risks, are they still thinking they can cause autism? I think its misinformation from sources that don't really know what they are talking about, usually Facebook.

There's a YouTube channel called Vaxxed TV have a look there to see what people have gone through after vaccinating their children again and again. You can't force vaccinations on everyone. Instead of judging, realise that there are genuine concerns for many people.

We are now reaching a generation where people have no personal knowledge of the diseases we immunise against. So people think of measles and rubella as giving spots.

I've known two people who lived with the impact of polio. There is no way I'd choose that for my children.

@babba2014 They can't force you to vaccinate but they can limit services to your child. In some states and countries you can't start school unless you have had certain vaccinations. If they do that here are parents going to leave their jobs to home school?

It’s totally untrue that rubella only causes problems in pregnant women. It can cause serious problems in anyone who gets it (although it’s usually a mild if unpleasant disease). The vaccine is harmless and there is no reason for a healthy child not to get it.

Unfortunately op I think some people are increasingly listening to rubbish they read on the internet rather than medical advice. It’s sad - I would support no school unless vaccinated rule.

Sowhydontyoukillme your anger is palpable, and while it is understandable, that and making moral judgements such as 'these people aren't fit to be parents' isn't going to help. It will just entrench people further in their views, as it feels like an attack. Also, it does nothing to address the reason for their fear in the first place.

Much more needs to be done on taking a more nuanced approach to tackle this. We could also do with more research to see if we can pinpoint more accurately which sectors of the population are more like to have damaging reactions to the vaccination. If we can do this with a better degree of certainty, much of the argument against could fall away. We would then have a greater uptake, better herd immunity and also fewer cases of vaccine damage (tiny though the numbers are - but the effects if it does happen can be catastrophic).

It's not a completely black and white situation at the moment, and this is what the anti-vax movement is exploiting. Better information and better communication is needed to counter it.

My friend refused to give her DC the MMR vaccine due to it 'causing seizures' her Son is currently in hospital with mumps 🙄

Personally I think if you dont vaccinate I think you should homeschool.

In my job I have dealt with a parent whose child died from a vaccine preventable disease. The child was unvaccinated as their mother read "research on Facebook" which said vaccines were dangerous.

I think of this toddler often. They will never go to school or university or fall in love or do anything else. It kills me at times to think of the life that was denied to them.