It really is one of parenting’s biggest questions right now. It seems that not a week goes by when I don’t get asked whether I chose to vaccinate my children or not. This is a question that preys on parents’ most basic fears. There’s so much information out there, a lot of it conflicting, that it’s hard to know what the best choice for your family is.
In order to make an informed decision, it’s important to learn how a vaccine works. A vaccine is a bacterium or virus (some are live, some dead) that is introduced into your body, tricking your immune system into producing antibodies. The antibodies your body produces in response to this “pretend” virus then protect the body from an invasion from a real and potentially dangerous virus.
The history of vaccinations actually goes back more than three hundred years, but credit for the first formal vaccination is usually given to Edward Jenner, a country doctor in England. It was common knowledge at the time that people who had contracted cowpox did not get the dreaded smallpox. In 1796, Jenner injected pus from a cowpox lesion into an eight-year-old boy who was unaffected by later exposure to smallpox.
Almost 200 years later, smallpox was eradicated from the globe, but not without a certain amount of controversy. In the 1800’s, much of the anti-vaccination movement revolved around the government mandates, seeing them as invasions of privacy. Of course, governments responded with the statement that they had the right to immunize for the common good of the population – that the good of the whole was more important than an individual’s rights.
Governments have an important reason for this suggestion: herd immunity. In order for a vaccine to be truly effective for a group of people, 85 to 95% of the population has to be immunized. However controversial, the smallpox vaccine was effective, leading the way to new vaccination discoveries.
The next big vaccine breakthrough was the polio vaccine that was discovered in the 1950’s. The polio vaccine was seen as the cure for a dreaded disease. Basil O’Connor, the president of March of Dimes in 1954 said, “I have just figured out that during the coming summer, thirty or forty thousand children will get polio. About fifteen thousand of them will be paralyzed and more than a thousand will die. If we have the capacity to prevent this, we have a social responsibility… it is our duty to save lives no matter how many difficulties may be involved.”
There were some major difficulties, including contaminated vaccines, some cases where the vaccine actually gave the patient the disease instead of protecting him, and the cost of vaccinations requiring boosters to keep the immune system on alert. Despite these factors, polio has been eliminated in most countries and there’s a world-wide eradication program happening right now.
The vaccine has been called “The most important scientific discovery”; researchers have been granted Nobel Prizes; diseases have disappeared from the face of the earth… So why is there so much controversy about vaccination?
Controversy has plagued the vaccination movement from the earliest days of the smallpox vaccine. Not only did the privacy question come up early and often, but other concerns started to arise almost immediately. People began to hear stories about botched vaccinations and people who were immunized but went on to get the disease later. These stories, combined with people’s deep-seated mistrust of the government requiring a medical procedure, grew into an intercontinental anti-vaccine movement.
The modern anti-vaccine movement is varied in its approach and desires. Some claim that messing with a people’s immunity is actually contributing to higher rates of cancer and diabetes. There is a huge movement of parents who believe that their child’s vaccinations contributed to his or her Autism. There are definitely documented cases of severe reactions to vaccines, including high fevers, seizures and, in extremely rare cases, death.
The Centers for Disease Control seems very clear in its opinion: vaccinating your child is safe and it’s an effective way to keep from getting some diseases. But what anti-vaccinationists find troubling is the lack of research to back up this opinion.
I read an interesting story by Allan Phillips, who is the director of Citizens for Healthcare Freedom. He said, “When my son was set to begin his routine vaccination series at age 2 months, I didn't know there were any risks associated with immunizations. But the clinic's flyer contained a contradiction: my child's chances of a serious adverse reaction to the DPT vaccine were one in 1,750, while his chances of dying from pertussis were one in several million.”
He began to research some common vaccine myths and here are some of his findings:
- The Federal government Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System was established by Congress under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Act of 1986. It receives about 11,000 reports of serious adverse reactions to vaccinations annually, which include as many as one to two hundred deaths and several times that number of permanent disabilities.
- VAERS officials report that 15% of adverse events are "serious" (emergency room trip, hospitalization, life-threatening episode, permanent disability, death).
- The FDA estimates that as few as 1% of serious adverse reactions to vaccines are reported, and the CDC admits that only about 10% of such events are reported. In fact, Congress has heard testimony that medical students are told not to report suspected adverse events.
- In the mid 1970's Japan raised their vaccination age from two months to two years; their incidence of SIDS dropped dramatically; they went from an infant mortality ranking of 17 to first in the world (i.e., Japan had the lowest infant death rate when infants were not being immunized).
In the December 1994 Medical Post, Canadian author of the best-seller Medical Mafia, Guylaine Lanctot, MD, stated, "The medical authorities keep lying. Vaccination has been a disaster on the immune system. It actually causes a lot of illnesses. We are actually changing our genetic code through vaccination...100 years from now we will know that the biggest crime against humanity was vaccines."
So are vaccines the “most important scientific discovery of modern medicine” or a “crime against humanity?” Quite simply, we may not know the answer to this question in our lifetime. But there are a few things you can do as a parent.
1. Make an informed decision for your family. Spend some time researching this question. There are lots of books written on the topic, and the Centers for Disease Control’s website is very easy to navigate.
2. Talk to your pediatrician about your struggle. Print up any articles that you find with issues that you’d like to addressed and ask him/her to read it and talk to you about it. Call your insurance company and talk to them. Do they cover adverse vaccine reactions? Most don’t. If not, why?
3. Consider urging your congressional representative to take action to require more research into the benefits and disadvantages of vaccination programs. It’s obvious that more work needs to be done – and quickly.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that my children are both fully vaccinated. And after doing the research for this article, I question that decision. If we have another child, I will look at the information again in great detail before I allow vaccines, perhaps waiting until at least two years old to vaccinate, and deciding for my child whether all of the vaccines are necessary. I might not make the “right” decision, but I will certainly do my best to make an informed one.
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