Don’t Be A Douchebag Tuesday: Vaccinate

by Cookie

File:Diphtheria vaccination poster.jpg – Wikimedia Commonscommons.wikimedia.org

Okay.

This.

This whole hot topic of vaccinations has been circulating the Facebook world for a couple of days now.  Maybe longer.  The above link is one of many stories that are out there about what can happen when you don’t vaccinate your children.  In this case, it was tetanus, a potentially devastating disease where the child made a full recovery.  A shitty ordeal for this family to have suffered, which in this case, didn’t put other people at risk for disease.

In the past, whenever I have written about anything remotely controversial, I try to be objective enough to advocate for people to have choices.  I think “I am not going to tell people what to do, because ultimately, we make our own choices and then we have to deal them.”

But in this case, I’m totally telling you what you should do.  Vaccinate your children.  Period. No choice.  Or face a fine.  Or you can’t register your kid for school.  Or whatever it takes to convince you to comply.

The father in this article has it 100% right, and it took his son almost dying for him to realize it:

“The mistake that we made was that we underestimated the diseases and we totally over-estimated the adverse reactions”

This is totally the truth.  Let me tell you, as a self confessed hypochondriac, it is really easy to get sucked into worrying about all the adverse effects you can get from vaccinations.  Some of them are total bullshit, like the link to autism.  And I wonder why we even still talk about this after the doctor who conducted this bogus “study” has been totally discredited.  Some of them are possible, like Guillain-Barre syndrome, but are ridiculously rare.

Anyway.  The reason I think we shouldn’t have a choice in the matter is because ultimately, the actions of a few well intentioned, but misinformed parents can affect the health of my child.  And when your poor decision making skills start to affect the health and safety of my family, I’m about to get up in your business.

Here’s the thing about disease.  Diseases are caused by pathogens.  Either a bacteria, or virus, or phage (scary!).  They invade our systems and make us sick.  They are able to multiply rapidly in optimal conditions.  And from my experience of working with large scale fermentation of bacteria, the human body provides a very comfortable environment at 37 degrees celsius for many bugs to set up shop.  That isn’t the only factor of course, but temperature is important for optimal growth.

Here’s the other thing about disease causing pathogens.  They are quite remarkable at change.  They are extremely adaptable.  So, if we give them a small pool of individuals who , for example, aren’t immunized against measles, it will give the bug not only a chance to make a small pocket of individuals sick, but to mutate into a form of disease where the standard vaccine is no longer effective.  And the new form of measles may have a higher death rate because the bug is stronger and harder for the body’s immune system to kill.

Now you’ve put my child, and  the rest of the world’s population, at risk for a disease that was so easily preventable.

Way to go, Bitchface.

So here is my advice to all of you who for one reason or another struggle with this decision.  Make your decisions based on fact, not assumptions.  Don’t assume you know more than the medical community because you read it on the internet that vaccinations are dangerous.  Don’t put my child at risk due to your own misinformation.

I am a firm believer that kids need to play in the dirt and get the flu and build up their immune system naturally.  But these are diseases with potentially deadly outcomes.  And they are preventable.  So please.

Don’t be a douchebag.