Re: Anti-Immunization Activists: A Pattern of Deception

It's sad to hear your story about a severe side effect of a vaccine, and the healthcare industry should do a better job of presenting side effect profiles. Nowadays the first thing that people (providers and patients) ask and SHOULD ask when discussing drugs/procedures IS side effects. It truly is a shame what you've gone through, but reactions like that are rare. It's all about percentages because the human body is so complex and unique from person to person that you DON'T know what will happen sometimes. You could go into anaphylactic shock from something you inhaled/ate that you didn't even know you were allergic to. You could get Guillain- Barre post-infection and the infection could have been asymptomatic, as was the case with a cousin of mine. The whole idea of eliminating disease through vaccines is by sensitizing immune systems to the pathogen, so that IF you get the pathogen in your system then the disease will be less severe, and you will be less likely to pass on the pathogen to others (most importantly people with weak immune systems). So, you could be fine with allowing your children to catch comething like measles or polio or mumps or rubella or whatever, because you feel that the risk is so small of catching it in the first place and they will be healthy and fight it off. That's fine and up to the parent, but if your child develops a diseases and spreads it around, although most people will be either immune through vaccination or by having seen the bug before, that innocuous infection can cause severe disease/kill someone with a weak immune system. We're not just talking HIV here, we're talking transplant patients, malnourished, elderly, babies, post-op patients, and anybody who just for no other reason has a weak immune system. Plus, pregnant mothers can pass on disease to their fetuses causing congenital defects and spontaneous abortion. Given the population density of the world, disease is pretty easy to spread. Noone can deny that. When someone gets sick at school/work, it usually causes everyone else to get sick right? When kids are in daycare it's NORMAL for them to get sick once a month or more. vaccinations are about containing and preventing disease, not just for the individual, but for the health of everyone. Maybe the preservatives in some vaccines are bad, of course it's possible, and they do have the risk of causing severe side effects, but ever since Jenner made that first vaccine, the percentage of people that have benefited FAR FAR outweighs the percentage that have been adversely affected. Is that small percentage any less important? Of course not, 100% is a hard number to achieve in this world. Tweet