laurawantsababy is it en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide thalidomide that your friend's mum was given? it was for morning sickness and they discovered that it caused deformities to the fetus. The extra tricky thing with that is that it is a potent drug and due to the treatment was administered in the first trimester, when morning sickness is worst. The medical and pharmaceutical professions learned enormous lessons from that and it led to all drugs being much more strictly researched and tested.
In the 2nd and 3rd trimester the baby is more or less fully formed, it just has to mature. I'm a bit nervous about nerve diseases such as GBS which was linked to the swine flu vaccine in 1976 and also some people believe that the adjuvant in the anthrax vaccine given to Gulf War soldiers is the cause of Gulf War Syndrome. But it all seems to be speculation. Very valid fears but they have not proved that these things were connected.
Given the numerous waves of controversy around vaccines full stop and drugs in pregnancy I am hoping/trusting that the experts have learned from these experiences and are not about to repeat their mistakes. We can't take that for granted, of course. But I don't like the alternative.
I live in the centre of a capital city, my son goes to a kindergarten with 90 other kids, my colleagues all have kids at school. I just feel that washing my hands, avoiding crowds and public transport and using antibac periodically isn't going to be enough.
So many killer illnesses (polio, smallpox, measles, mumps, German measles, tuberculosis) have been made more or less irrelevant in the western world by vaccines. I'm consciously choosing to hear the negative sides and worries about a vaccine for a new pandemic and then ponder them, rationalise them but ultimately file them away so I can attempt to believe that overall it's going to be fine.