It Took Two Months and Nearly a Million Dollars to Save an Unvaccinated 6-Year-Old From Tetanus

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

57. I think that's the missing piece of the puzzle of why people don't vaccinate.

I'm in the generation that got all the childhood diseases: measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox. Honestly, I never knew anyone who suffered bad consequences of those, but that's probably because we all got them and the bad consequences, while real, are still relatively rare.

I was in 2nd grade when the Salk vaccine came out. One of the boys who was in my kindergarten and 1st grade class (we moved to another city after that) had had polio and had a major brace on one leg. Over the years I've known others who had polio, including an 8th grade teacher and my late father-in-law.

The DPT vaccine was around for me. I recall my mother, who was born in 1916, mentioning once or twice of a cousin who died from diphtheria. It was when she was a child, and so long ago it meant nothing to me.

My own two sons got the MMR, although they were a bit too soon for the chicken pox vaccine, and so went through that. Luckily for them it was no big deal.

My older son is mildly autistic, Asperger's, and among the many things that can enrage me is the suggestion that it's from vaccinations. I can assure you he was different from the day he was born. Whatever the source of his Asperger's, it sure as hell wasn't vaccines.

Slightly more to the point, the young parents today were themselves vaccinated, and didn't even go through mild bouts of those diseases, let alone the more devastating versions.

Here's something else that I think may be a factor: Babies do inherit a certain amount of immunities from their mother, which are apparently reinforced if the mother nurses them. So a nursing infant will have a degree of immunity early on from some diseases. And here I'm talking about a world in which there are no vaccines, and those kids will eventually get those diseases. I rather suspect that now that we've had nearly two generations who've mostly been vaccinated, there simply isn't that pass-on immunity. Which means the vaccines are even more important for babies.

Please note, that while I'm acknowledging that the immunity you get if you get the disease is a life-long one, I'm not advocating forgoing the vaccines. For that, I will simply bring up smallpox. Yeah, you get it and if you survive you'll never get it again, but in all likelihood you'll be disfigured from the scarring. I have read more than once that a woman, back in the pre-smallpox vaccination day, who was not scarred was automatically considered beautiful.