The Vaccine Debate – Are Non-Vaccinators Really Irresponsible?

By Anastacia Mott Austin

I was thrilled when chicken pox came to our school.

Actually, I didn’t know that it had, only that my daughter seemed to have an unusual number of bug bites. She’s allergic to most bug bites, and they get raised, red, and swollen almost immediately. So I didn’t think it was too unusual.

But then I saw another one, then another. And sure enough, my other daughter had a few "bites" too. It was only then that I found out that there’d been an exposure of chicken pox at our school.

I was relieved. I chose not to vaccinate my children against chicken pox, knowing that the vaccine was one of the less effective ones, and that having chicken pox almost always confers lifelong immunity.

I called our doctor. We love him. After one initial lecture from him about herd immunity, we’d had a calm, rational discussion about vaccinations. When I asked him, respectfully, if he’d be willing to sign something that guaranteed my children’s safety if vaccinated, or if he would be willing to be personally responsible if one of them had an adverse reaction, and he declined, we were okay after that.

He told us to come in the back door of his office, so we wouldn’t infect any other patients. We arrived, he took one look, and agreed that they had the pox. We went back home.

After hearing from friends about my irresponsible decision to forgo vaccinations, I was expecting a long, painful bout with the chicken pox. It never happened. The spots were only itchy for one of my children, and even she did not suffer for too long, save one unfortunately placed "pock" that caused some anguish.

We immediately withdrew my daughter from her kindergarten class, and I was happy to later note that not one other child in her class came down with chicken pox.

After the initial short illness and brief period of itchies, the worst side effect of the chicken pox was boredom. Quarantined from other people for the duration of potential infection, my children were forced to make do with each other. They weren’t sick but they couldn’t leave the house…the only thing that made them ill was the presence of one another.

That was four years ago. As I type this article, I’m waiting to hear back from a lab about whether my daughter has contracted whooping cough, or pertussis. If so, she caught it from a girl in her class who had been vaccinated against it.

Our doctor didn’t seem concerned, and doesn’t think it’s pertussis. But as a parent who doesn’t vaccinate, I’m especially careful to explore all of the possibilities, just in case. If my children have been exposed to pertussis, I want to notify other parents so they can make an informed choice for their own children. If caught early enough, a precautionary round of antibiotics can prevent a case of pertussis from getting worse or infecting others.

This latest illness has me wondering, for the 50th time perhaps, if I’m making the right choice. As a parent I would rather have my children contract an illness that confers immunity than undergo a vaccination that possibly does not, and has potentially serious side effects.

The pertussis vaccine does not seem to be very effective, as 30-50% of children infected with whooping cough during epidemics have been vaccinated. In addition, the pertussis vaccine is one of the most problematic immunizations on record, causing more adverse reactions than any other vaccine on the market.

The chicken pox vaccine, as well, does not confer lifelong immunity, and can lead to an epidemic of older children and adults contracting chicken pox, when it is a far more dangerous and painful disease. In addition, studies have shown that the chicken pox vaccine can increase one’s risk of contracting the painful condition known as shingles.

In making health decisions for my children, I use a risk versus benefit model. What will the risk to my children be (and children in the surrounding community) if they get the disease, and does that risk outweigh the benefit of contracting an illness and getting more efficient lifelong immunity? Same story with the vaccines. What is the potential risk of this vaccine? Can my doctor guarantee its safety? Do I know what ingredients are used? What is its record for efficacy in conferring immunity, and its record of adverse side effects? Is the benefit of the shot more compelling than the risk of it?

I actually have no problem with the idea of vaccines. It’s not dissimilar to homeopathics: give the body a small amount of a disease and let the body fight it off and develop antibodies which will protect it in case of a more serious strain. I would feel better if vaccines were the oral, live virus type that was once used in the Sabin polio vaccine. While this type of vaccine was discontinued due to its causing many cases of polio, I understand how it works better. It’s an oral dose, so it enters the body in a similar way as an actual virus. A weakened, live version of a virus acts the same way that it would if it were contracted in the usual way.

But the more common killed versions of diseases that are used now are injected into muscle tissue, along with a nasty soup of animal by-products and potentially lethal chemicals. The body can’t react to it as if it were a virus, which is why some experts say that the accumulation of killed viruses and chemicals injected into children’s bodies are the reason that autoimmune diseases have seen such a sharp rise.

While I have faced some judgment over my decisions, I am increasingly not alone as parents question both the ingredients used in vaccines and the dubious logic of bombarding our young children’s immune systems with more and more vaccines at younger and younger ages.

Last month thousands of people converged in Washington, D.C., to make their voices heard in a "Green our Vaccines" rally. The gist of the protest was that the current mandated immunization schedule for infants and small children is overwhelming, with more than 30 required vaccines before a child reaches the age of two years old.

More doctors are seeing the results in their young patients who have clearly suffered ill effects from the ingredients in vaccines. Clearly, not everyone suffers ill effects from vaccination. But with the combination of viral and bacterial particles, DNA, RNA, animal proteins (and that’s a nice way of saying it), plus the chemical preservatives needed to contain them, it’s no wonder that some children are vulnerable to the combination of so many vaccines.

New studies come out every day revealing that the generation who will reach adulthood in the next decade will suffer from more autoimmune disorders than any generation before them.

Do I know for sure that vaccines are to blame? No. Our environment is increasingly filled with chemical, carcinogenic and biological pollutants that we and our parents never had to deal with growing up. Does that mean I think we should add to the toxin load by injecting our children with substances that have unknown, and sometimes untested ingredients? Also no.

People like me who forgo or delay vaccinations tend to get lumped into a category of marginal crazies, accused of being socially irresponsible and taking advantage of the "herd immunity" effect created by a majority who vaccinates. We are also accused of having bought into scare tactics and being ignorant of how modern science works.

I suppose that’s possible, but it has surprised me how often I heard, when discussing the topic with others who disagreed with me, that they had not spent one moment researching the science behind vaccinations, the potential side effects, the ingredients they were agreeing to inject into their children’s bodies. Why would they not even look into it? "Because my doctor said it was safe." Oh, okay then. As I discovered with my own doctor, your physician will not be willing to be accountable for your child’s well-being if there is an adverse reaction to a shot. You, as the parent, have already taken on that responsibility.

I am aware that I take this same responsibility, and then some, as someone who does not vaccinate. I’ve noticed it can be difficult sometimes to do the right thing, not because I don’t want to, but because no one else takes it as seriously as I do. I am waiting for those lab results for the pertussis test so that we can be accountable to our community if my children should happen to test positive for it. My doctor didn’t even encourage the test, saying that it didn’t matter, there was no treatment for my kids once they’d reached the coughing stage.

But, I asked, if we know then we can let other kids who have been exposed to mine know about it, and they can take precautions (like taking antibiotics early enough), right? "Oh, yes, I suppose so," was the reply. Also, if my kids are ill with whooping cough, the tickle in my own throat and stuffy nose could also be pertussis (which tends to be much milder in adults), and then I’m potentially infecting other people every day. I’ve called my doctor’s office three times today, and they haven’t called me back. They don’t seem nearly as worried as I am about the possibilities.

Maybe that’s because I’m actually not an irresponsible person in deciding not to vaccinate. I care deeply about the surrounding community, and I know that because we don’t vaccinate, we have an extra responsibility to keep them informed. The child who exposed my own? I talked with her mother, they didn’t even inform the school of her diagnosis. Did she feel less of an impulse to notify the community because her own child had been vaccinated? I don’t know.

It would have been easy to take my doctor’s attitude, and skip the blood test. We wouldn’t have had to take on the potential stigma of being the family who exposed everyone to whooping cough. No one would have had to know. And if my children had been vaccinated, I could have said, oh well, what could we have done?

It could just be a bad cold. I hope that’s the case. But I would like to know for sure so that I can be a responsible citizen.

So the next time you decide that those who don’t vaccinate are being irresponsible and not taking the health of the community at large into account, think again. Usually a great deal of thought and research went into the decision.

Until you’ve done the same, please don’t jump to conclusions and assume that I don’t care about your child as well as my own.