Vaccinations - I'm confused, advice needed!

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OK....For any of us over 50 (ask your parents or grandparents if you aren't) you should understand how important these vaccinations are. There is no scientific, peer reviewed evidence that ties vaccinations to autism. Unfortunatly, people like Jenny McCarthy don't help the discourse and keep it in the news.

I repeat there is:

No scientific, peer reviewed, evidence that ties vaccinations to autism

We need to drop this debate and direct valuable (and scarce) funds elsewhere.

My son has had all of his vacs on time--he will be 7 in a few months and he didn't have any problem with the booster.

I believe that AS is genetic in my son's case; my sister is on the spectrum as is my son's second cousin.

I don't vaccinate my kids, and it's not just because of autism. Vaccines have never been tested to see whether they cause cancer, auto-immune diseases, or genotoxicity. There are many documented and proven side-effects of vaccines, from allergic reactions, Guillane-Barre, fever, rash, passing out, and even death.

Risks from the actual diseases are pretty minimal. In our parents and grandparents generation, everyone got measles, mumps, whooping cough, chicken pox, etc. and no one was afraid of it, it was just normal. You got sick for a week or two, then you were fine. All the kids got sent to their sick friends house on purpose to catch these diseases and get them over with. Because as kids, they are minor illnesses, but for adults can be more serious. And I had a bad case of chicken pox when I was little, and even then it wasn't that bad. I never went to the doctor for it. And I was infected on purpose by my parents sending my to my poxy friend's house to play. I had whooping cough when I was 13, and it sucked, but I never went to a doctor for that either. So what, it's a bad cough, you know?

The last case of polio in the entire North American continent was 14 years ago. Polio is spread when infected feces get into drinking water. Our sewer treatment systems are pretty good now, and knowledge of hygiene in the general population is excellent. It's just not a threat.

I still waver on tetanus. It's extremely rare, but usually fatal. I might say yes to tetanus shots after age 2 or 3. But I'm not sure which action carries more risk.

All the other shots just seem stupid - rotavirus, hib, chicken pox, whooping cough, rubella, mumps, measles.

I think it's an over-simplification to think of these illnesses as "not that bad." You can NOT know how they will play out for an individual child, and a doctor recently wrote a very moving column about why he most definitely had all his own children vaccinated. He had been in the emergency room earlier in his life as young children were brought in unable to breathe and otherwise suffering horribly from some of these illnesses, he saw the panic on the parent's and children's faces, he knew the panic within himself, and you will never convince him that the diseases we vaccinate against were "not that bad."

To keep them at bay, a minimum percentage of the population needs to be vaccinated. There is some sort of critical mass equation playing here. Fall below that percent and outbreaks occur. The diseases are only gone and infrequent while the wall from that critical mass is there. Without it, they come back, and they will prey upon the most vulnerable.

Everyone has the right to make this decision for their own family, I absolutely believe that, but that decision needs to made fully informed and not making light of the risks to the kids and society.

The minimal percentage DW talks about is called herd immunity.

Basically, once a certain percentage ( 75-95% depending on the disease) of a population is immune, the chances of an outbreak are minimal due to the fact that the disease cant spread because the susceptible people are to sparse.

So yea a few here and there can not immunize, but once it drops below the threshold, outbreaks will happen and the death rate will go up. Yea it wasnt that bad when you had it but people die from it. With herd immunity, that amount is minimal.

People die from vaccines too. Or permanently injured.

Yes. A very small, very small percentage that someone at a desk somewhere calculated was a far smaller cost and risk to society than the diseases being vaccinated against. It seems certain pre-existing conditions may be able to predict who is at risk from the vaccines, and more work can and should probably done on narrowing that down. Getting a better handle on who bears such risk and cleaning up the potential allergins in some vaccines, could eliminate this risk, IMHO. A concerned parent could and probably should ask for testing on the known risk areas.