No vaccinations? Really?
|Published
The study, in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), is the first to show how perfluorinated compounds can negatively affect the response to vaccines. Picture: Jennifer Bruce The study, in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), is the first to show how perfluorinated compounds can negatively affect the response to vaccines. Picture: Jennifer Bruce
With some trepidation, I approach the subject of vaccinations for small children.
In the weirder fringes of the Internet, a woman has been selling Lollipox - lollipops infected with the chicken pox virus that you can buy and give to your child so that they can be exposed to the virus when they are small.
Clearly, that’s just loony - who would buy such a thing on the Internet?
But the idea that there is something bad about vaccinations and that one’s children should develop a “natural immunity” is held by a lot of people who are not obvious loonies. So what gives?
In so far as I understand the thinking, the idea is that the vaccination contains chemicals which are harmful, and which can have unintended side-effects. This comes in part from the now completely discredited study which linked the MMR vaccine to autism.
There also seems to be a general suspicion of conventional medicine and drug companies. And there I have to stop because I have to tell the truth: I find the idea that you would choose not to vaccinate your child so odd that I have never had the patience to even listen to the arguments about it.
I’m old enough to know two people crippled by the polio virus, a disease now largely eradicated by widespread vaccination campaigns.
My sister-in-law has always had a dodgy chest, and my father-in-law always put that down to the whooping cough she had as a child after a then-scare about lead in the injections led them to prevent her getting the vaccination.
A friend who is a paediatric nurse has seen children die of measles and chicken pox, and her children have had every jab known to medicine. My son has had all the State vaccinations and any others I have been able to afford. I just don’t want him to get sick if I can help it.
Disease is a bad thing. Vaccinations stop disease. Surely this is a simple equation?
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