Maybe I Was Wrong About Vaccines

I was never an outright vaccine denier. But I was definitely a vaccine questioner. Questions like, why the fuck do we give so many vaccines for things that aren’t going to kill a healthy American infant? Why do we give them thisclosetogether and like six at a time? Do they cause SIDS? Isn’t it better just to get chicken pox, because we got chicken pox and we were fine? Then Dr. Bob Sears, who willfully confuses himself with attachment parenting guru, Dr. William Sears, said we should vaccinate on a delayed schedule and Hallelujah, we had an excuse.

So our kids never got the Hepatitis B vaccine at birth. They all had milk/soy protein intolerance, and two of them had issues with nut, citrus, apple, and berry proteins as well. So I was stupidly paranoid about them reacting to anything. That meant one single vaccine per visit. One. One shot, preferably while I was nursing, band-aid ripped off right away because even the latex-free ones gave them rashes, and a half-hour wait at the ped’s to make sure the baby kept breathing. The next week, another trek to the germy office – full of other people’s jacking, disease-ridden children – for the next shot. No combo vaxes, though once the kid hadn’t reacted to a vaccine, I agreed to let him have it alongside a new vaccine. This eventually became totally untenable, and by baby #3, I had shrunk my resistance to just one live vaccine per visit.

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Only I put off the MMR shots. Because my middle son got the shot – and got the fucking measles. Well, not the measles, the CDC says, but a non-contagious immune reaction that looks remarkably like the measles. Like, spots all over his back and a ridiculously high fever. So I put that vax off for everyone because I didn’t want to deal with a kid having fake measles for five days as a SAHM. No one wants a sick kid. No one especially wants to be stuck in the damn house for days on end, away from Target and all the things she loves, because her kid looks like a walking CDC mortality and morbidity report. I put off the chicken pox vax for the same reason. My kids were wildly behind the recommended schedule, even though I believed in vaccines, believed they worked and thought all kids should be vaccinated as a public health service. Just, maybe, you know, not as quickly as they said they should.

A change of heart

Then we switched peds. And the doc who agreed to take us was not nearly as tolerant of my vaccine-delaying views as the last. “You need to get these kids all caught up or I won’t see them,” he informed me, all high and mighty with his stethoscope and his needles and his giant-ass store of vaccines in some refrigerator somewhere. So I started doing research. I was sure that everything makes sense. I would use medical sources he would agree with. I would show him evidence that delaying vaccines was no big deal. I would show him, in fact, that it was a good fucking idea. I would change him and his stabby little mind.

Except. Well. Um. According to the WHO, “Scientific evidence shows that giving several vaccines at the same time has no negative effect on a child’s immune system … when a combination vaccine is possible, that results in fewer injections and reduces discomfort for the child.” My kids scream and hide under couches when they find out they’re going to the doctor. You mean other kids don’t?

But don’t they like, get sooooo many more vaxes than we did back in the day? An article in Pediatrics says that “Infants actually encounter fewer antigens in vaccines today than they did 40 or 100 years ago.” So they get more vaccines, but fewer antigens. Which is better. Oops.

Let’s look at the numbers

And all those vaccines I thought weren’t going to kill a healthy American? Turns out that they used to. Not in ginormous numbers, but kids still actually died from measles, like 400-500 a year. Chickenpox killed 100-150 people a year before the vaccine. Haemophilus Influenzae Type b (Hib) used to infect 20,000 kids a year under 5 in the US, and kill 3-6% of them. I went through every vaccine and looked at death and complication rates before it. I started to think about shutting the fuck up.

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Then I read through every vaccine sheet for every vaccine my kids would get vaccinated with. I was looking for how many adverse events they caused. And. Um. If you believe the CDC (and I believe the CDC), “the risk of a vaccine causing serious harm, or death, is extremely small.” Vaccines also do not cause SIDS, contrary to the pseudoscience I’d somehow absorbed from the echo chamber of attachment parenting. So…yeah. My bad.

So I pried my kids out from under the couch. I held them down while they got like, four shots each for the first of several times. And I didn’t even bitch about the latex.