A grateful thank you and a few questions - Page 3

[poppan]

I don't know why I keep having this thought but I've been having it a while and the thought was stimulated by this thread, so I've come back here to say it.

I think I'm a little different than many others here in that I haven't really made up my mind whether vaccines are good or bad public policy. I have only made up my mind that they are a bad personal policy for my children. I believe the risks presented by injecting them with vaccines is greater than the risk of contracting a "VPD" and subsequent risk of death or serious injury from the disease.

Of course, that analysis depends greatly on the low incidence of disease here. So... when pro-vaxers accuse me of "riding on their herd immunity" -- well, I confess that I think I might be, in part.

I guess I felt like the OP was in some way maybe grappling with the same question--do vaccines work and are they therefore a good idea from a public policy standpoint, even if a few children get sacrificed along the way. JMHO but I think they work, some more, some less, depending on which one it is. I don't think they are singlehandedly responsible for the decline in the various diseases, but I also don't think they do absolutely nothing. I think they just do a lot less than what people think they do, and I think they do more harm than people think they do, and I think they have the potential for doing additional harm that we are not currently aware of.

And I guess I just wanted to say that in the end, I decided it didn't matter if vaccines worked or not, if they were good public policy or not, if I should take my fair share of responsibility for the greater good (and I think it bears repeating that I have not decided if there is a greater good). When I became a parent, that went out the window for me. I've become selfish and I only care about my own kids. They have next to no chance of coming down with diptheria, so why should I risk DTaP, and so on.

OP: When I did my research, I found the CDC pink book and MMWR surveillance reports to be the greatest help and extremely interesting sources of info on the actual incidence of each disease in the US.

[Deborah]

Just to cheer you up the teensiest bit...

The vaccine against diphtheria was working fine in Haiti, no diphtheria, until several months after the earthquake, when the vaccine seems to have stopped working against the disease. Of course the inadequate water, food, sanitation and housing might have played a role in the outbreak. What do you think?

Oddly, the same thing seems to have happened in Russia, although it has never been acknowledged. Societal breakdown = diphtheria outbreak.

So you really are okay not vaxing your children against diphtheria. Because millions of people whose vaccines are quite worn off have been exposed to this disease as people in Europe traveled back and forth to Russia and Russians traveled to Europe. People in Russia living with inadequate food and sanitation would get ill, even with vaccinations, people in Europe with decent living conditions didn't get ill, even if they hadn't had a booster vaccine in 40 years. The one exception seems to be people who went to Russia and dallied with lots and lots of prostitutes and then came back and got sick. But maybe they weren't paying attention to cleanliness and nutrition, being distracted by that evil distractor...

The evidence that the dip vaccine is what saved us from this disease is quite feeble.