I was an antivaxer, nineteen years ago.

[KitSileya]

69. It fucking matters!

I don’t know if I would make the same decision today, antivaxers are so reviled...but I might. What I don’t get is if your kid is vaccinated, how are they endangered by kids who aren’t vaccinated? Isn’t the point of getting them vaccinated to protect them from contagion? So why does it matter.

It matters for all those who could not get vaccinated due on medical grounds, such a close family member of mine who had a severe allergic reaction to his first vaccine, the MMR. He couldn't get any of the others, but thank God he got the measles as a child (it was a mild case, as he had gotten the first dose of it), not to mention he got the mumps too. If he had gotten the mumps as an adult, he could become sterile. Had he been a girl - well, she might be very unlucky and get german measles during pregnancy, which nearly always leaves the child with a disability, if it survives at all.

It matters for those who are immuno-compromised, such as another close family member who's getting chemotherapy these days. It doesn't matter that she's had all of her vaccines, as at times she has nearly no immune system to speak of. Right now she has to be careful because some contemptible anti-vaxxer traveled while infected with the measles in her town - on a plane (all the passengers had to be tracked down to be checked out), on a train (ditto), and then went to the emergency room. The measles virus can survive for up to two hours when coughed into the air, so you do not even have to be in the same room at the same time as patient zero to be infected. More people are immuno-compromised than you think - the very young, the elderly, many being treated for cancer, heck, even people with Crohn's disease are immuno-compromised.

It matters to those who are too young to be vaccinated. There's a baby boom among my colleagues rght now - four babies born in the last 5 months, and several more expected in the next half year. All these babies won't get their vaccinations at birth, you know, they're spread out and some vaccinations are done twice, like the aforementioned MMR.

For some people the vaccines just don't work. They don't know why, but a small handful never develop the immunity, no matter how often they get a particular vaccine. Those affected by this seldom know it, but unbeknownst to them, they are fully at the mercy of those around them getting their vaccines and protecting them that way. The only way you would know is if you get the disease despite being vaccinated, by which time it's too fucking late, or if you titre to check if a vaccine 'took'. How many of us get titres to check our vaccines? Not many. In other words, you could be unprotected. Your beloved child could be unprotected. As we speak, you could be like the groups above, reliant on everyone else not being fucking numbnuts when it comes to vaccines, hoping against hope that the parents around you don't think that having a child on the autism specter is worse than a dead child, willing to sacrifice other people's babies, grandparents, cancer-ridden siblings in order to magically make sure that their child doesn't get autism.

Yes, it fucking matters!