I have two girls, ages three and eleven. My daughters have gotten every last vaccine I can possibly get for them. I have done the same for myself.
Why? Because quite simply, vaccines are one of the most amazing medical discoveries we humans have ever pulled off. Because I don't want my daughters to lose their hearing from measles. Because hepatitis b kills 780,000 people each year and I don't want my daughters to be part of those awful numbers. Because polio isn't quite gone from the planet. Because the flu made two of my dear friends so sick I literally begged them over the phone to run to an ER. Because there is no cure or treatment for tetanus. Because whooping cough can choke a child to death and break an adult's ribs. Because a friend got chicken pox when babysitting and spent two weeks miserably in bed when she was twenty-four. She still has the scars on her face, by the way.
[READ MARK PAREDES' COLUMN ON WHY HE DOESN'T VACCINATE HIS DAUGHTHER]
Sometimes these actual facts about vaccines get lost. Open nearly any modern American publication and seek out information on the subject of parenting. You will inevitably come across an article implying that vaccines are death on a platter. Vaccines, we are told, cause autism. They have toxins. They are used for diseases that are not only not life threatening but actually fun.
Nonsense.
None of these allegations are true. Vaccines have been repeatedly studied. And studied. And studied. And studied. Scroll down for a list of over a hundred studies showing no link between vaccines and autism. We have autism because of many reasons including the fact that kids who used to be diagnosed as mentally retarded are now called autistic. Friends who are special education teachers (including my late mom) now tell me that no one is labeled mentally retarded. Autism is where we put the social services so that's where we put our kids.
Vaccines do not contain toxins any more than your own body does because formaldehyde is a byproduct of your basic metabolic processes.
I'm in my forties. When I was attending the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway in the 1970's we didn't have as many vaccines. We had hib instead. We had about a thousand needless deaths a year. I had the chicken pox when I was seven. I was in agony and so was my little brother. To this day, the smell of calomine lotion evokes a peculiarly ugly memory in my brain and an urge to itch. We didn't really have flu shots. We had the flu. I had it in my teens. I lost five pounds in a week and remember the odd happiness when I could finally sit up.
My daughters get the shots. They will grow up in a world where girls will get the Gardasil shots instead of cervical cancer or genital warts. In 2007, the Aussies wisely decided to provide the shots for all their girls free of charge. Over seventy percent of Aussie girls get the shots. A recent study found the results: a sixty-one percent decrease in the rate of genital warts. This evil little disease causes all kinds of head and neck cancers so they should see a corresponding reduction there as well in the near future. Only thirty-eight percent of all American girls get the vaccine.
Please explain to me again why it is better to get cancer than to get three shots. Because it is one question I am grateful I will never have to answer when talking to my girls.
Nearly all doctors, all peds and all scientists are not engaged in a massive conspiracy to poison our kids with vaccines. Neither I am. I don't have a multi-million dollar house like a certain anti-vax doctor in Chicago who runs one of the most profitable websites on the net. I don't have a mansion like Andrew Wakefield who helped start a needless epidemic of measles in the UK.
I am lucky. My daughters will not be one of the children growing up in India, who does not have access to the MMR shot so they get one of the most contagious diseases in the world. According to the UN sponsored organization Shot@Life, an organization dedicated to providing access to four life saving vaccines (and an organization I proudly volunteer with), hundreds of thousands of children die each year just from lack of access to vaccines that we take for granted here in the United States.
So I vaccinate. I vaccinate because I really am lucky. I vaccinate so that my girls will get a flu shot instead of two weeks in bed from the flu. I vaccinate so that the neighbor with the compromised immune system doesn't get hepatitis b. I vaccinate so that the neighbor with the newborn doesn't have to worry that her baby will get brain damaged from a bout of pertussis or that SSPE from the measles.
I vaccinate because this is the world we all need and deserve: one where all of us benefit from one of modern medicine’s best achievements.
— Stacy Mintzer Herlihy is a freelance writer based in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in publications such as USA Today and the Newark Star Ledger. She is the co-author of Your Baby's Best Shot: Why Vaccines are Safe and Save Lives (Roman & Littlefield 2012 paperback edition 2015).