Vaccine Nation

Wow. Haven't seen the movie, only the trailer on youtube. Would like to see the whole movie. I do have my own children vaccinated and encourage the parents of my students to do the same. I believe many, many lives have been save by preventing the illnesses the vaccines protect against. I haven't yet seen any convincing evidence to the contrary.

Alan Yurko's child died of shaken baby syndrome, and he has a criminal record longer than your arm. Yes, he's handsome and soft spoken. So what. Jeffrey Dahmer was too.

That he's being treated as a poster boy for this movie in itself means I will not see it.

And Gary Null needs to take the colander off his head.

OTOH, I'm grateful we have free speech in this country. The only thing I agreed with was the woman who said vaccines are not risk free. No medical treatment is.

I strongly believe in immunizing our children and ourselves. As a PICU nurse, I've seen too many inadequately immunized infants try to die dozens of times a day from pertussis they've picked up from an adult whose immunity has waned. I've seen children lose limbs or lives to meningococcemia. I've nursed an infant who died from chicken pox. I have a friend who had polio as a child that caused her to have weakness on her right side, who now has post-polio syndrome and has a re-emergence of symptoms five decades later. The only time I saw a haemophilus B infection it was in child who had not been immunized; the child is now deaf. But I've never seen diphtheria or tetanus except on paper. Recently I've been reading through death certificates from the 19th century while researching my family history. What I've read there is enough to make me cry... entire generations of families dead from measles or pertussis or typhoid or diphtheria or cholera. In some particularly bad months the list might read:
"~Patrick Brown, son of William Brown and Caroline Smith, age 5 months, November 18, 1887 of whooping cough.
~Catherine Brown, daughter of William Brown and Caroline Smith, age 1 years 8 months, November 20, 1887 of whooping cough.
~James Brown, son of William Brown and Caroline Smith, age 3 years 1 month, November 24, 1887 of whooping cough.
~Margaret Brown, daughter of William Brown and Caroline Smith, age 4 years 5 months, November 30, 1887 of whooping cough."

Interspersed would be names of other small children in the village who died in between. A community might lose a dozen or more children to a single outbreak. When was the last time such an event occurred in Canada or the US?

There have been numerous credible studies that have disproven the theory that vaccines cause autism. But there are those who say, "Don't confuse me with facts, because I KNOW." Oh, and the last time I recall there has never been an association made between broken ribs, retinal hemorrhages and significant shear injuries in the brain and vaccines of any sort. Give me a break!

I live in an area with a sizable Amish population; most of them are not vaccinated, and I have seen some of those diseases at my hospital.

So much unnecessary suffering.

This is not the same as a person who cannot be vaccinated because of a known allergy or other disorder. And I certainly have no problem with spreading out the schedule, or even skipping some vaccines that are of dubious efficacy or need.

Edit: Janfrn, aren't you the nurse with an autistic son who's about 30 years old?

Thank you so much for writing that! I wish people now days realized that we are dealing with horrible deadly diseases!! They just don't seem to get it. We have to hand out VIS forms with every vaccine we give, but I wish those forms had pictures! Or maybe give a video to every new mother that shows the devastating effects of these vaccine preventable diseases!!! Ugh I get so touchy about this subject.

Yay! Now I have the outlash of this to look forward too! As if the MMR/Autism "study" that came out in 1999 wasn't enough trouble.

Ugh.

No vaccines aren't 100% risk free. But neither is Amoxil or Omnicef, and parents practically BEG for these when their kid has a runny nose.

i just checked out the site for the first time...
Why do people not get their info straight before posting such garbage on the internet! For one thing, Thimersol has been out of vaccines for a long time now!! Only the flu vaccine contains it now and it just just a trace amount!!! errrrrg! This is why there are outbreaks of these diseases because people post this junk on the internet.

We just had a case of pertussis d/t non-vaccination. The reasoning for non-vaccination was that an older child had autism (non-vaccinated also) and the mother did not want to risk her other child (kinda odd sense of theory but to each her own). Now she's rushing to get the vaccines.

I am still concerned that we are vaccinating our children too early. Why does a newborn need a Hep B vaccine? Neither I nor any of my family or friends had this vaccine until we were in our 20s and none of us have Hep B. The risk of transmission is so low that I think it is unnecessary.
Yes, we should vaccinate for MMR, pertussis, tetanus, diptheria etc, but it seems like we are vaccinating too young. In the 70s, children were not vaccinated as early as they are today. Maybe there is a genetic link, but maybe we aren't letting children's immune systems develop long enough to tolerate the vaccinations. Does anyone have any reason why we should be vaccinating for Hep B at birth?