Reply #111: Eh....

[moriah]

I disagree with your assessment that "middle-class" kids shouldn't be vaccinated just because you think they will never catch the disease. The "it could never happen to me" attitude like that is one that drives me up the wall. Middle-class kids can still get blood transfusions or be victims of sexual abuse -- and experimenting with drugs is not limited to poverty-stricken kids or rich playboys. Neither is having sex early. (And I'm pretty familiar with the ways blood-borne illnesses can be transmitted, since my dad died of HIV last summer.)

There are some kids who cannot be vaccinated for whatever reason. I have a friend who had an encephalitic reaction to her first shots, and because of her severe reaction to them she cannot get any other shots, not even a flu shot. The only thing keeping her safe from measles, diphtheria, etc, is that most other people are vaccinated. God help her if she ever steps on a rusty nail or gets bit by a rabid dog/raccoon/squirrel/bat (yeah, I realize that humans aren't routinely immunized against rabies, but she can't even take the post-exposure shots). If your kid is the only kid who isn't vaccinated, your kid is probably safe, because of "herd immunity" (just not from rusty nails, and there are a lot of those). But herd immunity only works when a high percentage of the population is vaccinated. If your child is healthy enough to get their shots and you choose not to allow it, you're putting my friend at risk. She's got a five year old daughter who would really hate to lose her mom because someone didn't even try to get their kid vaccinated out of misplaced fear -- her parents at least tried!

Given the subject of this article is vaccine scheduling more than vaccines period, my opinion on the subject is a bit odd. If the only way a person is going to overcome their fear and get their kids vaccinated is to use an alternative vaccine schedule similar to the one advocated by Dr. Sears, then I'm all for them doing it that way. It's a hell of a lot better than not getting your kids vaccinated at all. If you're scared of mercury in vaccines, they have ones that don't use it as a preservative, so use them instead. But since most kids are vaccinated, you can link just about anything to vaccine use. A headline showing "Vaccine Use Correlated With Cooing" would be just as accurate as "Vaccine Use Correlated with Colic".

The bottom line is that more people die of vaccine-preventable diseases than die from vaccines. Your kid is better off immunized than not in the long run, and so is my friend and those like her who cannot be vaccinated if you get your kids their shots.