Great, anti-vaccination hysteria has killed seven infants in California. Whooping cough, once thought to be virtually wiped-out in the developed world, is making a comeback thanks to illegal immigration and greedy anti-vaccination activists.
As I noted in my previous post on the subject, too many people make emotional decisions based on graphic images. They see pictures of kids with autism or whatever the anti-vaccination hysteria du jour is but they don’t see countervailing images of the diseases that vaccinations prevent.
Just to provide some real education, here is a video of a 12-week-old infant with whooping cough. You can hear the distinctive strangling intake of breath at the end of a coughing fit which gives the disease its name.
As you listen to this, recall that in the normal course of the disease, this horrific coughing last for a month with two more months of less-harsh coughing. The disease kills by sheer exhaustion.
There is an adult whooping cough booster available. If you have contact with infants and/or a large illegal population (legal immigrants have to get vaccinations), I strongly recommend you get the booster.
And, if you know some anti-vaccination idiot, strap them down and make them listen to the video in a loop.
I believe in vaccination – it saves lives. Let me get that out of the way first. When I was in elementary school, we averaged 34 to 36 kids per classroom each year – depending on how many were out with whooping cough. I had the measles and was in bed in the dark for two full weeks. The effects of Polio were still recent and painful to families who’d lost children to the disease. The mother of one of my friends had had Polio, and she was the first person I knew well who had to go in a wheelchair always.
When my children were infants, they received one “shot” when it was time for their vaccines: the DPT. They sometimes received an oral vaccine as well. And I think they got these at 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, 2 years and again right before 1st grade. By the time my youngest entered high school, there was something required then too (not the hpv vaccine which is a whole nuther topic).
When you give a baby a shot, it hurts. The baby screams just like it would if you were sticking pins in its little leg. And the baby does not know why someone is hurting it – doesn’t know this if for its own good.
My babies were pretty easy going and extraordinarily healthy. But vaccine time was always a bad time. They ran fevers, their little leg where they gave the shot would be swollen and painful and they generally ran fever for the next 24 hours. I would have to hold the infant on one side only so that its little sore leg didn’t have any pressure on it and just rock my baby for hours and hours. With but a few exceptions, this was the sickest any of them ever were as a young child.
Anyway, recently I went into a store where a grandmother I know works and her family had brought her infant grandchild in to her. The baby was inconsolable, running a fever, and had bandaids on both arms and legs. Time for his shots and they gave him FIVE injections. The areas around the injection sites were red, swollen and painful to the baby.
In the following article (which was the only one I could find that gives the numbers – I’m not championing the rest of the article or the organization), it says that today babies may be given as many as 26 separate injections by the time they are 24 months old. That’s not 26 vaccines put together to reduce the number of shots – that’s 26 separate shots. According to this article – and it fits what I keep hearing – at least a quarter of all parents are protesting that this is too much and questioning the wisdom of giving vaccines for non-legal diseases that we all had and got over and no one died or was disabled from. Here’s the url:
http://www.thenhf.com/vaccinations_77.htm
So, if I were a young mother, and I had not seen the effects of rampant childhood disease like whooping cough, but HAD seen the effects of overzealous medical treatment, and my baby went though that torture once… I might have to do some serious research before I allowed that to happen to my child again.
The Medical profession needs to back off and come up with a graduated set of recommendations for parents who are not comfortable with Comprehensive Vaccine Reform. Concerned parents and those whose children react badly to vaccines need to be allowed to choose only the old DPT shots and MMR by mouth. Then as such parents complete their research, let them add additional vaccines. In the interim their children are safe from what we know are the most dangerous illnesses.
I’m no doctor, just a mother, and I will end by confirming again that anyone reading this should immunize your children. If you can’t stand to be there then ask a relative or sitter to take the child in for you. It may be painful and hard on you but that is nothing like the devastation of a pregnant woman who contracts the mumps from an unvaccinated child – or God forbid a child contracting Tetanus from a small scrape while playing in the yard. Our neighbor’s donkey recently got tetanus in exactly that way. The germs that cause it are present all over – it is the vaccines that protect us all from that disease.
Tina,
Let me clue you into something. When someone offers a statistic that says “as many as”, “up to” or some other phrase with the same meaning, they’re giving you the most extreme, and therefore least likely, far end of the distribution curve.
Are there some kids that get 26 shots total during infancy? Probably. There must be some theoretical combination of injections of all kinds that would pile up for some unfortunate kids. However, the vast majority of kids will get something like a half dozen injections for vaccinations. You can’t base policy on extreme cases.
Giving the most extreme statistics possible is a sign of a manipulative argument. They’re trying to evoke concern or outrage by creating the impression that the extreme and rare represent the ordinary and common.
This topic seems to draw all the nut jobs out of the woodwork,which is good, since it is useful to see how these people “think”. My sister in law is involved with a “church” that doesn’t believe in vaccination and is working very hard for a Darwin for her grand-daughter.
People like this are beyond any reasoning, and the only persuasion that is effective is force-the law.
Was referring to the comments on the previous post you linked to.Boy,there were some doozies there.
Renminbi, thanks for clarifying. I didn’t read all the way down to comments. LOL guess even for commenting it’s necessary to do the full read. :-)
Shannon, you are right and as I said I wasn’t endorsing the site. :-) However, my friend’s experience is how it is these days: multiple shots very frequently and 5 all at once for two of the early visits. I finally found a better link (but it is a pdf file, sorry)
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/schedules/downloads/child/2010/10_0-6yrs-schedule-pr.pdf
Most babies are no longer just getting the small number of vaccines that were normal until very recently. My point was that trust in the experts can only take a loving new mother so far but there is a break point. And having seen the immediate results, I think the method of delivery is a serious factor that is not being considered in addressing the problem.
We’re talking about new mothers and fathers who will stand on their heads so the baby won’t cry, who routinely carry them back to the hospital ER the first night home because the baby is crying. Mothers who rock and weep and feel their own hearts pounding in panic when the baby’s fever goes up to 104 degrees after getting a vaccine. Fathers who get up every half hour all night to check on them both and then go to work the next day and call home every half hour.
Is it really preposterous to suggest that maybe a less traumatic experience during those vaccination visits would encourage more parents to continue the program?
If mammograms were less of… *everything*, wouldn’t women be much more willing to have them regularly?
If dentists all gave laughing gas and sent a car to bring the patient in for treatment, wouldn’t more people go to the dentist more often?
In the same vein, if babies could be given all these vaccines in a painless – or much less painful – form, isn’t it likely that fewer parents would balk?
Ugh. I couldn’t watch more than 5 seconds of that video. I have a 6 month old and I’m in CA (At least for another 10 days…). ANd I had an infant with asthma who took multiple nebulizer treatments a day, had a rescue inhaler, and still coughed and threw up so much we had to occasionally put her on steroids. (Oh, it only stunts them a little. AAAaargh.) Thankfully we made some changes and she somehow grew out of it.
Anyway, I know plenty of people who work with their doctor to get the most important ones, and maybe skip the chicken pox vaccine. My 4 year old just got her DTaP a year early, thanks to the stupid pertussis outbreak. But better safe than sorry, IMHO. And I got one too.
And actually, yes, 26 shots or more. See this schedule:
http://www.pamf.org/preventive/section1.html
Beats the heck out of an infant or toddler with a nasty disease, though.
I am just old enough (born in 1954) to recall my grandmothers constantly worrying about my brother and I having gotten our polio vaccine, and my mother reassuring them that we had. I am just old enough to recall seeing children slightly older than myself, wearing leg and arm braces, or getting around in child-scale wheelchairs. The monster that was polio was gone … but the damage it left was still evident, and still horribly real in the minds of adults. So I didn’t think twice about my daughter getting vaccines – she had the usual triad of polio-diphtheria-whooping cough, and caught the chicken pox all on her own. The memories of that kind of epidemic are pretty well faded among new parents today.
Most babies can be soothed within one minute of getting a shot or several shots. I have experience. Most do not get high fevers after immunizations. They might get a low grade fever overnight, but think of it as part of the protection program.
Preventing whooping cough, and the whole host of other diseases now controlled by immunization is a far greater good than the very short term pain of a shot and low grade fever.
I guess I’m older than most here. I got whooping cough as an infant, back in the late 40s. I’ve no direct recollection of it, but my parents told me of their sitting next to the crib 24/7 to be available to suction out the mucus clots. I certainly came down with all the ‘childhood’ diseases: mumps, measles (two types), chicken pox, etc. And polio was very much a fact of life. A 2nd grade classmate died; all the public pools were closed when an outbreak occurred within 100 miles. Vaccines were welcomed with open arms, once they became available, because parents certainly knew what toll they could take on children.
My son, born in 1985, had myriad vaccinations, certainly numbering into the 20s. But, as he was going to be living in the third world starting at six weeks of age, there wasn’t any hesitation about that. The one vaccination he didn’t get was for smallpox.
I was in Riyadh at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. State Dept. decided it was wise to get its officers in the region vaccinated against smallpox and anthrax. Interestingly, the smallpox vaccination I’d had over 50 years earlier was still functioning.
OMG!
My father-in-law spent virtually his entire career at the WHO as a field doctor all over the worst of the third world trying to wipe out hideous diseases by vaccinating against them.
His children, living with him in the third world, received every vaccine under the sun – from rabies to small pox. None of them were permanently damaged from the hyped up trauma of receiving shots.
I, however, was deeply traumatized by four years of clinging to life between the ages of 2 and 6 as I was shuttled in and out of hospitals suffering from something for which there was no vaccine.
Some Americans live a life far too cushy to understand what real suffering is.
Shut up and vaccinate your children.
The anti-Vaccine people must be right wingers, because only right wingers are opposed to the benefits of modern medical science.
Yup, 26 is about right on the numbers, but it’s the total number of injections up to the age of four. If your state uses combination vaccines like Proquad(MMR and chicken pox), Pentacel(diptheria, tetanus, acellular pertussis, Hib and inactivated polio), the numbers of actual injections may be lower still. The count would be around 18 total if Pentacel is included in the schedule (replaces DTaP, IPV and Hib for the 2 month, 4 month and 6 month visit), 16 if Pentacel and Proquad are used, with Proquad taking place of the MMR and varicella injections at the 1 year and 4 year visit.
If you just do the regular schedule of vaccines with no annual flu shots, you will eventually get to a minimum of 21 by the time you’re 12. This is after the Tdap booster, meningitis vaccine and HPV vaccines.
Not that many. The side effects are easy to handle if your nurse advised you of such. It’s not that easy seeing a baby getting vaccines, the alternative to such is even worse.
Robert Schwartz,
The anti-Vaccine people must be right wingers, because only right wingers are opposed to the benefits of modern medical science
It would be nice it was. Traditional or religious opposition to vaccination is a much less serious problem than having upper income college educated secular leftists go off the deep end. Unfortunately, that is exactly the case. The case in my previous post on the subject was at a leftwing, Berkley CA hippy school. The Hollywood freaks backing anti-vaccination are all leftists.
I forgot the tags.
I forgot the < satire > tags