I had a chat with a mother who refused vaccination for her family. She has five children, the youngest in her arms while she talked to me. I’d say the young is about eight months old. She is raging about vaccination, reasoning that it isn’t natural and it’s dubious why we don’t hear anything in the news about the fatalities of antigen injection. Vitamins are her best bet to build up their immune system.
Vaccination is an intervention against diseases. It saved thousands of medical cases in the United States. Before the widespread of measles immunization, 20% of affected people are hospitalized with 450 deaths each year. Vaccination equips immunity from diseases like chickenpox and hepatitis.
Yet, not everybody believes in them. Parents who refused their child vaccination were called ignorant. But 4% of pediatricians won’t give their own children ages 11 years and below any immunization, according to a 2005 study. Are these pediatricians ignorant too or do they know more than public knows?
Vaccines have side effects. The nurse may inform the patient that inflammation, pain and fever are normal occurrences after the immunization. But no one has ever told us, or at least in my case, that vaccination has rare but major side effects. For example, DTap, a vaccine to prevent diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (all are serious illnesses) has a 1:1,000,000 risk of developing encephalitis (a critical condition where the brain swells). Some may have long term side effects such as an inflammatory process that extends to a lifetime.
The ratio may be small but as Stephanie Messenger said, a mother who lost a baby after immunization, the “risk was 100%” when it happened to a child. The doctors call her son’s disease unexplained yet a mere coincidence that it occurred after the vaccination. Messenger had three more child, all are healthy and unvaccinated.
Administering vaccines all at once increases the risks. A recent study found a significant correlation between babies’ vaccination and hospitalization. Those who received the most immunization have higher and worse hospitalization occurrence. They also have higher death rates.
Giving multiple vaccines also increased the risk for older children since it is unusual to have a high dose of antigens all at once; and under normal settings, these foreign bodies are usually inhaled or swallowed, not pushed through the skin. But the US government is requiring vaccinations for immigrants and public schools in which multiple injections are given at the same time.
While a vaccine’s safety was studied incessantly, there is no scientific backup that injecting them all at once will not yield any unprecedented harmful effects.
Vaccines may have halted epidemics and saved many lives, but the mother I talked to was right. We don’t hear these stories and we don’t know the full information.