Why did you choose not to immunise your child?

[tulip27]

I am a practice nurse about to undergo a course with the dept of health about childhood immunisations.The pre course info wants us to look at why some parents are opting not to vaccinate their children.

So this is your chance to have your say. Tell me why you decided against it and I can out your cases forward at the course.

1.) I am very concerned about the levels of aluminium in them. Each vaccine claims to have "safe" levels of it, however this is debatable. the fact is, each single vaccine MAY have safe levels, but i am expected to give my child 7 in one go, which easily makes it unsafe

2.) there are health risks to vaccinations, and no i am not just talking about the autism implications. Vaccinations have always had risks, hence the vaccine damage compensation program

3.) i feel many of them are unnecessary. A healthy child with a good immune system ought to be able to fight off a case of mumps or measles fairly easily.

4.) it's too much, too early

5.) i object to the government trying to force me to to have the MMR. my children will have singles when they are older, the govt are cutting of their nose to spite their face really. they want more people to vaccinate, but they are unwilling to do it in a way that more people would use.

6.) i have to look at my children as individuals, not as a statistic, I feel that as babies and young children the potential risks of vaccinating are not worth it for MY children. hence i will wait until they are older.

7.) vaccines do not guarantee immunity, and even if you do gain some immunity it noit likely to last until they are adults. as adults many of the diseases supposedly protected against are much more serious (measles for example). vaccinations are merely delaying the age at which people get the diseases

thisisyesterday, thankyou for your post, I will take your reasons to the meeting and see what they say. Out of interest and don't feel you have to answer this, do you know many parents who have felt the same as you?

My son had a profound and severe reaction to one of his vaccinations ( the MMR) and is now severely autistic.
One of my brothers twin dDDs then had a massive seizure whilst in the GPs surgery having her MMR. I had a huge lump at the site of my smallpox vaccine which has never gone away.

My DD has issues with her immune system and I am pretty sure she, like her middle brother, struggles to react normally to vaccinations.

I investigated all the routine vaccinations and have been unable to find any , with probable exception of tetanus, which prevent effectively illnesses which she is likelyto contract and have a high likelihood of a serious complication.
Having had mumps and measles as child, along with all my cousins and friends, I am less inclined to view it as the plague it is seen as now.

She will probably have some at a later date. But for now my perception is that her risk is greatest from a vaccination that has damaged her brother rather than a possibilty of contracting an illness and then going on to have a severe complication.

It is not a choice I would recomend to anyone else but it seems the best of a bad series of options available to her.

And I get the pleasure of being lectured regularly by people who think I care what they think - which is nice .

I felt that the vaccination schedule proposed was geared to making life easier for the vaccination programs rather than be tailored specifically to my ds.

He was bf, somewhat ill in the early days, and I did not feel that the risk of contracting any of the diseases (first child, no childcare and little contact with sources of infection) outweighed the risks of an adverse reaction (I am very sensitive to vaccinations, and had a number of negative reactions when I was vaccinated as a child).

I did in the end give some vaccines (polio, tetanus and diphteria) as they are relatively inoccuous vaccines and very serious diseases. I was not convinced about the argument for the others, and am uncomfortable with giving multiple vaccinations together when safety tests on this have not been explicitly conducted. I found the argument on the NHS website (babies are exposed to millions of different bacteria all the time) so stupid as to be insulting, and am thus not at all reassured about the safety of it.

I am in principle against certain vaccinations, like the MMR, which I think make things worse rather than better - they prevent children from getting the immunity when they are young but stop working during adulthood, leaving them much more exposed to the risks of rubella and mumps at a time when they can do serious damage. I would rather hope that ds gets mumps as a child and if he doesn't I'll vaccinate him when he hits puberty.

Thankyou all so much for your responses and please keep them coming.

it was only quite recently that thermiosil was removed from the 2/3/4 month jabs for babies. The dept of health announced, as I recall, that it was removing the vax with thermiosil and introducing a new one without it but that there was actually nothing wrong with thermiosil (which is mercury).

It's things like this which make parents reluctant to vax.

I for one will not be getting the swine flu vax for my 4 and 7 yr olds. I have absolutely no confidence in it whatsoever.

Tulip, I'm guessing this is so that you can practise tailoring your answers when you meet these situations in real life.

Previously, mn responses on vaccinations have been collated and used to give advice on how to promote vaccination.

Tulip I can't imagine you will be a very empathetic nurse if you can read Pagwatch's story and simply say "thank you please keep them coming".

yes - with all due respect Tulip if you are working for the Dept of Health then you will be obliged to spout the party line. The party line which says that children like Pagwatch's don't exist.

I have two sons, neither of which have had the MMR, but both had the other standard childhood vaccinations.

My eldest son (now 9) was due his MMR when the whole autism scare kicked off. My husband has a son from a previous relationship (now 12) who is quite severely autistic, and the risk just seemed too great for our son. We thought long and hard, and at the end of the day both our instinct's were no, no, no. This obviously followed with our second son.

I could not have lived with the thought that I had deliberately taken my son to the doctors and allowed someone to inject him with a substance that could have damaged him so much. (Obviousy I do not blame anyone who did have the MMR and suffered an adverse reaction - you should expect to trust that the information provided is accurate and in your child's best interest, and to be honest I probably would have done if I had not seen autism at first hand with my stepson.)

With hindsight, I am very glad they didn't have the MMR, as my eldest son shows signs of being very mildly autistic anyway, albeit high functioning. I strongly believe that if he had his MMR we would be looking at a totally different child today.

However, I also have to face the fact that either of them could contract measles or mumps at any time and have a bad reaction. I also have to put up with people thinking they have a right to criticise my choice and tell me that I am wrong, especially it seems form within the healthcare profession itself.

Our HV at the time was obviously disapproving, and told me to go to the local hospital for children and babies who had been born to mothers who had contracted rubella whilst pregnant, and see if I still thought I had a right to not have my children vaccinated. Well yes, I do have that right, as my obligation is to my own children's health and wellbeing, and whilst I am terribly sorry that these children have been affected the way they have, it was not my choice to have a child when I have not been vaccinated against rubella and it was not me who withdrew the single rubella vaccine for pre-pubescent girls.

I also believe that the other childhood vaccinations contained mercury, which cannot be passed out through the body and therefore accumulates, and which is also highly toxic. This type of vaccination, I believe, has been banned by moth other countries, but was still widely used in th UK. That has to set alarm bells ringing, surely? I had my boys vaccinated against the other childhood illnesses despite this, as the illnesses themselves seem much more serious.

I have not vacinated my daughter (2 1/2) due really to all the reasons already stated.

Too much too soon
Contents of vacines
Risk of reaction - short and long term
why supress childhood illness? - it will help the future health if our children if they were able to contract these diseases and let there bodies deal with them naturally.
Generally the risks out weigh the benefits for us.
Yes there will always be decesions to be made ie. rubella (girls), mumps (boys) and I will continue to reassess our situation but for now I actually feel quite proud of our standing and really believe my daughter is a more healthy child because of the decission we have made.

Totally agree with everything what thisisyesterday has said

What thisisyesterday said.

I have weighed up the risks and benefits of vaccinating against each disease and the risks and benefits of actually getting those diseases and made decisions based on my individual children's health and immune systems.

Every time, so far, I have come down in favour of not vaccinating. I'd rather they had mumps and rubella naturally. The other, horrid diseases, I feel they are unlikely to suffer very badly from as they have very strong immune systems. I feel the risks of vaccinating are similar or higher than the risks of disease complications for my individual children.

Luckily for us, our NHS GP surgery see vaccinations the same way as we do.

Kerry - I can't read your thread now, don't have time, but will do so when I can. Just wanted to add that my DD1 did get her baby jabs (didn't know any better and just blindly did as I was told ). The 'bruise' on one of her thighs from one of the jabs is still evident 6 years on and it blisters horribly when she has baths that are too warm.
Thankfully it's painless, but I dread to think what shit is lying under her skin .

Now, I would never put stuff in any of my DD's bodies now unless I could see easily that it was worth the risk.

pretty much what thisisyesterday said, plus DS had a reaction to the multiple vaccine that contained PCV and was quite unwell for a few days afterwards. I refused the BCG at day 1 as well - why on earth would I want to inflict a painful suppurating wound on my brand new baby?

We actually fell off the centralised vaccine register and I didn't get called at 12m to have DS's Hib and MenC vaccines; I left it until he was about 16m before gettin round to sorting it out and the practice nurse was all for giving him the MMR first. I refused, wanted the Hib/Men C first as these were more important in my view; and also because the PCV is given at the same time as the MMR! She accepted my reasoning and said that, given the reaction to the first PCV, it would be wiser to have it separately from the MMR.

DS is now 21mo and still hasn't had the PCV, nor the MMR. I don't trust the MMR entirely.

I took on board the PN's words - you have a choice of either running the risk of your DS catching the disease and knowing you could have prevented it; or of giving the MMR and hoping that there are no after-effects. Well, I'd rather take the chance of him catching the disease tbh, because he may NEVER catch it - whereas I would have TAKEN him to be given the MMR and would suffer with the guilt of that all my life if anything went wrong.

They should re-establish the rubella vaccine at puberty for girls, bring in the mumps vaccine at 10 for boys and stop pissing around with multiple vaccines if they want the vaccine uptake to increase.

Good sound nutrition is a better protection against diseases than vaccines as well.

tulip, i know a fair amount of parents who feel the same, but only online!

i would say that 99% of the parents i meet in real life have had all the vaccines offered

Kerry, how's your DSs' arms now? any better? at the photo, btw.

am ashamed. Shocking grammar in previous post. Of course I meant How ARE your DSs' arms now?

Yes, my reasons are bits of everyone else's.

I read EVERYTHING I could - hoping to be convinced to do it - but nothing convinced me. And every single instinct I have said DON'T DO IT!!!.
DS has had quite alot of allergies, and I'm convinced he would have been damaged by it.

What has been said by others on this thread are also my reasons for not vaccinating.

However my most important reason for not vaccinating is that my first child reacted badly to baby vaccines and has had serious health problems ever since. She developed multiple severe allergies to most common foods and suffered from bowel problems similar to those of many autistic children.

What has put me off any further vaccinations the most was how my daughter was dealt with by the doctor we had at the time. He tried to deny for a long time that she had reacted badly (despite her leg being hugely swollen, hot, hard, red for nearly a month and her being unrousable from a very deep sleep for 6 hours after being jabbed) and he and his collegues proved to be totally incompetent with regards to helping my daughter in her suffering and distressing health problems. Basically they just wanted to wash their hands of us and get us to fark off.

Another more political reason I am not keen to vaccinate is because I strongly object to the treatment of Wakefield et al by the GMC. Doctors who investigate vaccines and find issues with them should have research money thrown at them to help them find out what the risks are for our children's health. They should have their reputations smeared in the press and be witchhunted by the GMC. If the government will not investigate safety issues honestly and impartially then they cannot excpect an informed public to trust their recommendations and their vaccine programme.

These are some of the reasons why I have opted out of further vaccinations for any of my family.

Kerry I hope your boys are improving and you are less worried. It is just horrible to go through this sort of thing. Make sure your doctor reports this or do it yourself if he/she is not keen to.

Oops, obviously that should read 'they should NOT have their reputations.....'