In general I don’t like to ruffle feathers. I pretty much have an opinion on everything 
but putting it on my blog is something I mostly stay away from. But, seeing as to how I am the one who brought the subject up, it is now “out there” so I might as well go with it.
I received the below comment on my post about Coxsackievirus. I can tell that the author cares passionately about children and their health and only has everyone’s best interest at heart. So do I. Which is why I am posting it in its entirety, followed by my thoughts on each part of it.
Hello,
I’m a complete stranger who just found your blog while googling the Mt. Taylor quad results. Congrats on the great time! I just did the snowshoe portion, and I can’t wait to go back next year. I thought I might pick up some training tips, but was moved by this post to comment.
As a pediatrics resident, I just want to say how sad (and frustrated) it makes me that you choose not to vaccinate your children. Yes, illness and pathology are a common and “sucky” part of life. But the diseases we vaccinate against can have serious side effects, and it’s hard for us to conceive of how many children (and adults) they have killed in the past, now that the majority of children receive routine immunizations.
Your children are protected against potentially serious illnesses by the people who choose to vaccinate their children. If your children should become ill with one of these illnesses, it’s true that they may get over it without any severe sequelae. But they are putting at risk other children who are unable to be vaccinated because they are immunocompromised either due to an inherited disorder or chemotherapy. Have you ever seen a 7 year old cancer patient with shingles? That REALLY sucks.
I saw a previously perfectly healthy 17 year old girl die within 24 hours after symptoms began from the H1N1 flu virus this year–she became brain dead. Did you know that chickenpox can be a very serious disease if you catch it as a teenager or pregnant woman? By not vaccinating your daughter against rubella, she runs the risk of catching a “slight cold” during her pregnancy and having a child born with congenital rubella syndrome. Rotavirus can cause severe dehydration (and expensive medical bills for hospitalizations); it kills millions of children each year in developing countries.
If there was a vaccine against coxsackivirus (which normally causes fairly innocuous hand-foot-mouth syndrome), I would vaccinate my children with it to prevent the rare but devastating complication of myocarditis and heart failure that coxsacki can cause. And unfortunately, any immunity your daughter may gain after a bout with coxsackivirus won’t protect her at all from other viruses, such as measles, flu, mumps, herpes virus, etc.
I urge you to discuss this issue with your pediatrician or other medical professional you trust. There are many people out there who will support your decision not to vaccinate, but as someone who has dedicated my professional life to caring for children, I really want you to be fully informed on this issue. I want your children, and as many children as possible, to grow up happy, healthy, and able to train hard for the Mount Taylor Quad! Thanks for listening, and best of luck for the future.
Sincerely,
Katy Goggin
Vaccinations truly are the hot-button parenting topic of our times. I think the most important point I want to make is that there is no right/simple/easy answer. There are many things to consider and ultimately the decision lies with each individual family. It is a decision that I took very seriously, and as you will see below I actually started on a modified vaccination schedule for McKenna before deciding that was the wrong path for us. Katy makes many very important points; what follows are my counter-points:
But the diseases we vaccinate against can have serious side effects, and it’s hard for us to conceive of how many children (and adults) they have killed in the past, now that the majority of children receive routine immunizations.
You are absolutely right that it is due to vaccinations that many lives have been saved. Especially when you consider something like Polio. Back in the 40s and 50s polio killed and paralyzed a huge number of people. It was an epidemic, and we owe it to vaccinations for halting that epidemic. However, many of the diseases that are currently being vaccinated against are far from epidemics. Some (like Polio) “are now so rare in the US that an unvaccinated child has no quantifiable risk of catching them, and therefore no quantifiable chance of spreading them to other children.” (quoted from the July-August 2009 Mothering Magazine article “Vaccine Debate”) Most of the others are common illnesses that, although some can have serious side effects, are treatable through medical interventions. Keep reading for more on that later… Similar to Dr Howard Morningstar, I am concerned about “the potential overall effect on the immune system of multiple vaccines” and want to “save the emergency measures, like mass vaccinations, for true emergencies.” (also quoted from the above article)
Your children are protected against potentially serious illnesses by the people who choose to vaccinate their children. If your children should become ill with one of these illnesses, it’s true that they may get over it without any severe sequelae. But they are putting at risk other children who are unable to be vaccinated because they are immunocompromised either due to an inherited disorder or chemotherapy. Have you ever seen a 7 year old cancer patient with shingles? That REALLY sucks.
I’m sure it does, and the last thing I want is to cause any one else injury or pain. However, an immunocompromised person is also at great risk from things like the common cold, which is far far more prevalent than the diseases being vaccinated against. As a socially responsible person, I do my best to practice good hygiene (for both me and my daughter) and stay home when ill to avoid spreading any virus we may catch, but my primary responsibility lies in keeping my daughter healthy and safe. Which of course brings me to the biggest anti-vaccine argument: I do not trust in the safety of vaccines (nor in the motivations of the pharmaceutical industry). There are concrete examples of “bad batches” of vaccinations causing brain damage, and we are currently facing an epidemic of non-communicable diseases that have no explanation (such as: asthma, allergies, autism, childhood leukemia, arthritis, and many more…). Most people would say that it is likely these have some sort of environmental origin. I am by no means saying definitively that vaccines cause these diseases. But it would be irresponsible for anyone to definitively say that they don’t. No one knows for sure one way or the other. What I do know for sure is this: in every aspect of my life I do my best to reduce my family’s exposure to toxic substances. Toxic substances can bring no good to our health, and we have no way of knowing exactly what ill-effects they may bring. In our society it is impossible to avoid chemicals 100%, but to intentionally main-line them through the great number of vaccinations that the AAP wants us to seems crazy to me. Vaccines are full of toxic substances such as aluminum, mercury, formaldehyde, 2-phenoxyethanol, and sodium deoxycholate. I truly hope that in 5, 10, 15 years time we don’t see an epidemic of 15 year olds all getting mysterious auto-immune (or other) chronic diseases, but we have no precedent or long term research on the number of vaccinations currently being administered to prove their safety. The vaccinations given in the past (such as the Polio example) were A) few in number, B) generally given to non-infants therefore to people whose body’s were larger and more able to tolerate the amount of chemical being injected, and C) given just one dose, usually, rather than the 4-5 doses currently being administered for most vaccines. I could go on about this point, but in the interest of space, moving on…
I saw a previously perfectly healthy 17 year old girl die within 24 hours after symptoms began from the H1N1 flu virus this year–she became brain dead.
Many perfectly healthy children get vaccinations and end up with chronic health problems. A friend of mine’s brother reacted to the pertussis vaccine. 30 years later he has the mind of a 7 year old. We could all quote examples from both sides of the argument. Therein lies the problem…it is not an easy answer.
Did you know that chickenpox can be a very serious disease if you catch it as a teenager or pregnant woman?
Chickenpox used to be a common childhood illness, virtually harmless other than making someone feel very sick. In our over-vaccinated, disease-fearing society, we aren’t getting exposed at young ages, delaying the possibility of getting the disease until a time when our weak immune systems have severe reactions.
By not vaccinating your daughter against rubella, she runs the risk of catching a “slight cold” during her pregnancy and having a child born with congenital rubella syndrome.
In 25 years, my daughter will have the opportunity to make the decision for herself if she wants to get vaccinated against rubella to protect against this. By then she will weigh 100 lbs more than she does now and will be significantly less likely to have an adverse reaction. It will be her choice.
Rotavirus can cause severe dehydration (and expensive medical bills for hospitalizations); it kills millions of children each year in developing countries.
Fortunately dehydration is treatable with IV. McKenna may actually have had rotavirus recently; many many of the kids around here recently went through a full week of diarrhea, and rotavirus is such a common virus it may have been the culprit. Further, the rotavirus vaccine is extremely new. A friend of mine (who happens to be an RN) was surprised that there is a vaccine for it; there was no vaccine for it when her 5- and 6- year old kids were babies. They just didn’t worry about it. Now that there is a vaccine, we are worried about it?
I want your children, and as many children as possible, to grow up happy, healthy, and able to train hard for the Mount Taylor Quad!
We definitely want the same thing!
Like I said above, I didn’t come to this decision easily. To begin with, I had to look at my own history. When I was 5 I had a minor reaction to the Tetnus vaccine (and bear in mind that when I was a kid we were only given a few vaccines and at older ages than they do them now). When I was 15 and went in for the booster, my mom told the doctor about my reaction. They chalked it up to the vaccine being a horse serum, and they were now using a human serum, so we went forward with the shot. Within a few hours I was having a major reaction, vomiting, covered in a hot red rash. This kind of escalation of reaction with subsequent shots is very common, and with the current vaccine schedules children receive 3-5 shots before they are considered vaccinated for that illness.
Then I began talking to a lot of people, with differing views, about why they made their decision. I read a lot, including Dr Sears’ The Vaccine Book. I really feel that book puts forth a balanced viewpoint. After reading it, I decided to go forward with vaccinating McKenna, on a very modified scheduled. I had planned to get her only 1 or 2 shots at a time (since overloading the system is one of the biggest concerns with vaccines). I began at 2 months with DTaP. All seemed fine. At 3 months she received PC and Hib. That night she reacted. I have never been so terrified in my life. I thought surely I had just done irreversible damage to my precious infant. I knew right away that I was not proceeding further with vaccinations, especially given that reactions escalate with subsequent shots. McKenna now shows no signs of having a vaccine-injury, but I will never know if it isn’t possible that someday in the future she may have some condition develop that may have been caused by one of those two vaccines.
Two more points and then I’ll shush, I promise. It would be well worth anyone’s time to read Dr. Richard Moskowitz’s article Vaccination: A Sacrament of Modern Medicine. If you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, at least read the section about Measles. Truly fascinating.
The last point I want to make is that the AAP and the pharmaceutical companies do things that make many people not trust them and therefore question *all* vaccinations. My case in point is the Hep B vaccine. Hep B is a disease that is transmitted either through blood or semen; and yet the AAP guidelines have newborn babies, still in the hospital, some weighing just 6 pounds, just 24 hours old, receiving this vaccination. I can not imagine a less crucial vaccination to receive at birth. A newborn baby’s body simply is not equipped to deal with that. Fortunately, since we birthed McKenna at home, we did not have to deal with refusing this vaccination, but the vast majority of new parents are confronted with being told that their brand new baby is about to receive a vaccination. But most people don’t question authority, and having a newborn is overwhelming and leaves the parents in a very vulnerable state. Taking advantage of parents like this makes it very difficult to trust the guidelines set by the AAP for the rest of the vaccination schedule.
Clearly I would be devastated if McKenna got an illness that led to a serious situation. But ultimately our decision came down to this:
I am more afraid of what might happen from a vaccine than I am of what might happen if McKenna were to get an illness. Most side effects of illnesses are treatable. Most side effects of vaccines are not. If she got a vaccine injury, it would be something that I did to her. And I just don’t know that I could live with that.