EvC Forum: Childhood Vaccinations â€“ Necessary or Overkill?

Why I believe the choice should not exist is because a parent choosing to avoid vaccinations for their child puts my children at risk too.

I'd like to provide a little additional argument along these lines, sort of reinforcing and repeating what you've just said.

A very similar reason is that not all vaccinations "take", meaning that some people receiving a vaccine do not develop immunity. Even if there's only an 80% "take" rate, that's high enough in a fully vaccinated society to provide the effective equivalent of full immunity as there are insufficient vulnerable individuals for the virus to gain a foothold in the population.

In other words, even in a fully vaccinated population not all individuals develop immunity, so there's always a percentage without immunity. So when vaccination rates fall below 100% then the percentage of the population without immunity is correspondingly higher. It is only high vaccination rates that keep those without immunity as safe as those with immunity.

Unvaccinated children are only safe from infection if they live in a population with a high vaccination rate. The lower the vaccination rate the more danger such children are in, as well as the children for whom the vaccine didn't "take".

People like LindaLou who prefer not to vaccinate their children are taking advantage of those with social responsibility, not to mention common sense. A stance against vaccination also shows an appalling ignorance of the lessons of history. Here's a page of links to the history of polio in Canada. Reading some of this you get a sense for the feeling of helplessness and desperation of populations at risk. The pictures of iron lungs and crippled children are also helpful in giving a sense of the period.

Here's an excerpt from World Geography of poliomyelitis that gives a good brief history:

Closed swimming pools and cinemas; calipers; an iron lung; a withered limb; too often a premature death - the enduring images of poliomyelitis each summer for generations of parents in the first half of the twentieth century as the disease spread with increasing severity around the world. For parents, few infections scored higher than poliomyelitis on the 'dread' factor from the early years of the twentieth century as each successive wave of the disease outdid its predecessor in the number of children it crippled and killed.

Poliomyelitis has been associated with humans since they first lived in large communities in the riverine civilizations of the Middle East some 5,000 years ago. For centuries it remained a scarcely-noticed background disease. But, from the last two decades of the nineteenth century, it emerged as a global epidemic disease during the first half of the twentieth century. Then, from the mid-1950s, the availability of safe and effective vaccines and the articulation of worldwide mass vaccination programmes by the World Health Organization (WHO) and national agencies brought poliomyelitis to the brink of global eradication.

Here are some headlines from the past that we hope we never have to see again:

Here's a couple about influenza in New Hampshire in 1918:

Those opposing vaccination will bring the curse of Santayana upon all of us.

--Percy

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