Vaccines

Today I had to take my baby in for more vaccines and I think it hurts us almost as much as him. There are few things harder to do as a parent than to hold down your child while he is hurt, even if it is for his own good. And it is.

I am vehemently pro-vaccines. The paper that had come out several years ago with dubious connections between the MMR vaccine and autism has been outed as a fraud (see previous post from last week or the week before). There are minor risks but in general, getting the diseases are much worse than the proven potential side-effects of the vaccines. Even more important, vaccines are a public health issue. Yes, as a child I had the German measles and chicken pox without any lasting problems, but today it could be quite different. There are millions of people out there with immune deficiencies, whether from treatment of an illness (like cancer) or an autoimmune disease (AIDS being the big one), or even temporary conditions like pregnancy, old age or being a baby, and they live in society and come into contact with other people every day. People travel so much more, and are compacted with other people (trains, elevators, cities in general), that we are all exposed to more germs and a larger variety of them than thirty or forty years ago. My son has already been in three of the four corners of the country and only missed going to Canada last week because I haven't gotten his passport yet. I'd hate to see him get horribly ill because he came into contact with someone who wasn't up-to-date on their vaccines and he was too young to develop the immunity (or finish his course of shots). This has already happened once because his former pediatrician didn't want to give him the H1N1 vaccine. Or worse, my son giving one of his great-grandmothers something for which they no longer carry the antibodies for.

While I understand some of the rationale that people give for delaying some vaccines, there are few rational reasons to avoid them. So please, use common sense and vaccinate your child.