The vaccine "debate"
I live in a very crunchy community. There are a lot of things I love about the crunchiness of this place. Almost everyone breastfeeds, which is great for ladies like me who marched through Hell and back learning to breastfeed and needed help from a lot of different sources. I also love that people keep the community clean, and that there are a lot of open spaces, and that no one wants to welcome Walmart or build a shopping mall.
But there are a lot of things about crunchy living that aren't so great. Around here, a lot of people don't vaccinate their children.
Now is that crunchy, or is it just plain naive? I'm not sure. I do know that I, personally have read a lot about the whole vaccine "debate" (and I use quotes because I don't think the non-vaccinators have enough of a point to even make it a debate) and I remain absolutely convinced that choosing not to vaccinate your child is irresponsible, not just to your own child but to all the children he or she comes into contact with.
Ah, I can hear the cries of indignation already. "If I choose not to vaccinate my child, how does that affect children who are vaccinated? If vaccines are so effective, why should it matter to you if some children aren't vaccinated?"
As disturbing as they are, I love reading anti-vaccination arguments because they show such a profound misunderstanding of how vaccinations actually work.
Let’s do a little basic math.
Vaccines are not 100% effective. For any individual child, a vaccine offers only partial protection. For the sake of argument, let’s say 95%.
If all children get vaccinated, then 95% of the population is protected from the disease. That means 5% are still likely to contract the disease if they are exposed to it, but since the other 95% won’t contract and therefore will not carry the disease, those 5% are unlikely to encounter the disease and therefore receive some additional protection just based on the fact that the other 95% of the population are protected.
If only 50% of children get vaccinated, then 50% of children have 0% protection, and 47.5% of children won’t get the disease because they were vaccinated, and the remaining 2.5% are children who got vaccinations but may still get the disease because the vaccine, for whatever reason, did not give them full protection.
But now 50% of the population is running around without protection, and all those kids are much, much more likely to encounter, contract, and therefore carry the disease. So that remaining 2.5% of the population are a lot more likely to encounter sick children and become sick themselves.
So yes, not vaccinating is irresponsible, and yes, it does have an affect on children other than your own.
The anti-vaccination arguments assume that because vaccinations are not 100% effective, that must mean they are 0% effective. It’s not a black and white world, ladies, there are many shades of gray. Vaccinating does not offer 100% protection, but it’s a lot better than 0% protection. And it works best when everyone does it.
My very favorite anti-vaccine argument: your child is more likely to develop a reaction to the whooping cough vaccine than he/she is likely to actually contract whooping cough.
That’s correct. Most kids are vaccinated for whooping cough, therefore, it’s not currently a very prolific disease. If everyone stops vaccinating for whooping cough—which is what anti-vaccinators seem to be suggesting—then suddenly the disease becomes a very serious threat and those statistics will do an about-face.