Yesterday, I went to the family doctor for a checkup and some scripts. On the way out I asked the doctor if the swine flu vaccine will be combined with the seasonal flu vaccine, when it comes out later this year. He said he didn’t think so, but he was reminded that my brother and I haven’t had the swine flu vaccine and we had to go back into his office and get the jab.
So an innocent question backfires in such a way that I have to have an injection – typical.
That night I was telling a friend of mine about the unfortunate incident and I got into a discussion about whether vaccinations do more harm than good.
Obviously I believe in vaccinations, but there is a lot of so-called evidence suggesting that vaccination, in particular the combined measles mumps rubella (MMR) vaccine, could result in disabilities such as autism and even attention deficit disorder.
All this started in 1998 from a now discredited study of 12 children originally published in the British medical journal The Lancet that found that the MMR vaccine could be responsible for giving autism to children. It was later discovered that the author of the study was receiving funding from lawyers involved in a lawsuit against the manufacturers of the MMR vaccine.
Many British parents panicked and started failing to immunise their children causing a measles epidemic years later.
So far science has been unable to prove a link. My personal opinion is that there is no link. Even if there is something to the link it must be very tenuous for a not to be picked up. An un vaccinated child is still many times more likely to suffer death or disease than the one in 1 million chance of being disabled by the vaccine.
Many vaccination opponents will point to their children and say they have never been sick even though they haven’t been vaccinated. The only reason why these children do not get sick is because they are protected by all the children around them who are vaccinated – this is called herd immunity. The only reason vaccination opponents have a viable choice not to vaccinate their children is because the majority of the population is vaccinated.
Vaccination definitely makes the world a better place. Before vaccination parents could expect to lose more than 50% of their children to disease. People also forget the polio epidemic that would render people totally paralysed, almost like a type of muscular dystrophy you could catch. Luckily this disease is almost eliminated due to mass vaccination programmes. If enough people fail to immunise their children some of these epidemics could return.
Don’t let a bunch of discredited science stop you from doing what is best for your child.