Utterly Meaningless

Pardon my French, but Megan and her doctor friends are a bunch of idiots. Send them to my house and I’ll be happy to let them pay the therapy bills for the post innoculation speech and occupational therapy. Thanks to the CDC’s schedule of vaccines I was under house arrest waiting for therapists for about five years.

“Parasites.” Whatever.

Ugh, what a messy issue this has become.

I read up on how vaccines work when I was still pregnant, and decided to go ahead with the normal time-table. It’s pretty scary to me to think that there are places in this country where the percentages of vaccinated people are lower than what’s needed for ‘herd immunity’ to work. I think about a baby too young to be vaccinated dying or a pregnant woman who was never vaccinated again rubella having major health issues with her newborn. I remember the stories I’ve heard from some elderly folks who know what it was like to live in fear of these illnesses. Or I think about the 30,000 children who die every day from a preventable illness.

I wonder if this is just me, but I’ve never heard of anyone my age (plus or minus 5-10 years, even while growing up) having issues with vaccinations. I have to wonder if it’s just incredibly rare and it’s getting more coverage now or if more parents today blame vaccinations for their children’s health issues when they’re not the problem. I can understand wanting to blame *something* for my child’s major health issues, especially if no one could tell me what was going on.

Lisa

I know most of the women my age (±2 years) who got vaccinated for rubella (at least on the East Coast of the US) got an “ineffective vaccine”. In other words, we weren’t protected at all, and never knew. Many of my friends (myself included) only found this out when we were already pregnant with our first children – oops! Maybe it was widely known in the medical community, but I never heard about it.

There was at least one problem with a vaccine that I personally know of. My uncle was given the live polio vaccine around 1950 or so. It caused him to have polio, and he currently is living with post polio syndrome. What that means is he uses a walker and is only 58 years old.

I’ve heard about similar events. They’re unfortunate, and I know we all wish things like that didn’t happen. I suppose vaccines are like many things in life where you’re basically playing the odds. That being the point I was getting at.

I turned out not to be immune to rubella when I was pregnant with my first child (I was 29 and it was 5 years ago but I grew up on the West coast – not sure if that puts me into NJRoadies group or not). I was fully vaccinated as a child, so it was either a failure or it “wore off” or whatever.

This wasn’t a big deal, though, because rubella doesn’t run rampant around the country due to routine vaccination. I am very grateful to all the people who have been vaccinated and have made sure that their children are vaccinated so that I didn’t have to deal with that disease or its potential consequences. After my son was born, I was re-vaccinated. During my second pregnancy, the antibodies were still present.

Vaccines do not always work. It’s like birth control… it may fail either because of inherent weaknesses, or because it wasn’t used properly. This is one reason, by the way, why it is so important that everyone get vaccinated. The more people there are who have an effective vaccination, the lower the chances are that the disease will get a foothold and kill people. After all, any given vaccinated person may have not got an effective vaccine. You really have to get that “herd immunity” going good.