My long, venty post about something from Facebook is long overdue.  I intended to post about this on Saturday, but I rapidly ran out of time before Greg came home and we went to see The Mechanic.  We were supposed to see No Strings Attached because he didn’t feel like sitting through something as deep as Black Swan or The King’s Speech, but we were late and our only two choices were True Grit and The Mechanic.  It was definitely a guy movie.  I didn’t care for it, but I fell on the way out of the theater and it was kinda funny because I did the same thing on our first date (it was even at the same theater) and our first date was three years ago this Thursday.  I found the timing amusing.  Greg said it would have been hilarious if I wasn’t pregnant.

But I digress.

The subject of my vitriol is this:

M: So glad I did the research on vaccines before getting Belle vaccinated!  Absolutly no vaccines for my little one yet if at all before she is at least 1!!!

 Followed by this:

Ann: What are your concerns. In Colorado, you can’t go to school if you are not given shots, or provide a very good reason not to have them. There is also concern for being vulnerable to people around you that have stuff and you do not have the protection that the shots provide. Many say that the reason whooping cough came back to the U.S. is do to immigrants that had no shots, and spread this to people they are near.

M: Well the fact that the flu shots have been proven to have little to no bennifit is one. Also the link to the hepatitise b vaccine and autism is annother concern. Also doctors are reccomending all these vaccines at younger ages now when they… are not even reccomended by the advisory committee on immunization practices, the american acadamy of pediatrics, the american acadamy of family physicians, the department of health and human services, and the centers for disease control and prevention untill at least six months of age. Im not going to over medicate my daughter just because her doctor says to do so. Cleanliness and proper sanitation are still the best preventative measure against disease that there is.

M: It is also required here in Iowa to have all these vaccines before going to school or entering daycare, but if good cleanliness practices are used in both, we would have no worries when not having the vaccines. Hepatitise for instance is on…ly transmitted through direct blood contact or the injestion of feccal matter from an infexted person. If caregivers wash their hands before meals and after changing a small child, what fear or hepatitise would there really be? None. It is the same in the cases of most diseases. Annother example is pink eye for which there is no vaccine. Pink eye is just an irritation of the eye caused by feccal matter. Again cleanliness is the ONLY prevention there is for pink eye!

Laurie: There are waivers that you can use in Iowa and many other states that “require” them. Doc’s kids have never had a vaccine. There are MANY reasons NOT to vaccinate. Do the research!

 

Ann: My personally opinion is that there are way too many reasons not to get them. Hope that she stays healthy.

 

 One: M is an idiot for not getting her daughter vaccinated.  Two: Her mother-in-law is an idiot for encouraging her.  Three: If all those highly respected medical establishment types really thought that vaccinating a two-month-old was a very bad idea, no doctor in the country would do it.  Well, maybe some of the more disreputable ones might, but not the majority of them.  Four: I take exception to her remarks about pink eye.  Justin has been fighting it for the last three weeks and neither my home nor my daycare center are unsanitary.  Also, her remarks about having nothing to fear from disease if you just keep everything clean are crap – polio started killing people when sanitation was improved and people were consequently exposed to it later in life.  It’s actually asymptomatic if you’re exposed to it as an infant, which I didn’t realize till I was researching it for a paper once.  Besides, keeping things clean and washing your hands religiously doesn’t always keep you from picking up nasty bugs like the flu, although it does greatly reduce your chances of getting it.  Still, if flu vaccines were actually ineffective, people wouldn’t get them.  Besides, just because you get the flu vaccine doesn’t mean you won’t get the flu, it just means that you’re protected from the strains that the flu vaccine includes.  There are so many different strains of flu virus that I rather suspect it would be impossible to vaccinate for them all.