About Me

Decades ago devastating childhood diseases such as diphtheria and polio ravaged various regions of the globe at regular intervals. Indeed, in some less developed countries, some of these diseases still inflict tragedy.

It is unquestionable that vaccines changed all that for the majority of mankind. Considering the fact that before vaccines, the immune systems of large numbers of children were unable to combat those dreaded infectious diseases, it seems undisputed that overall vaccines help the immune system combat these serious diseases.

I would qualify this opinion by stressing that initially vaccines were developed against devastating diseases, not against every conceivable childhood condition.

Immunity to infectious disease can be developed by natural exposure or by vaccination and it would seem to make sense to allow immunity to develop naturally in the case of less serious infections. For example the serious complications of chickenpox, though real, occur much less frequently than for example, paralytic polio did 40 years ago.

I think there’s a difference between keeping our children safe by vaccinating them against serious disease and preventing their bodies from learning self-protection naturally by vaccinating against every possible infectious agent.

With regard to the anti-vaccine crowd I’d have to say they’re in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sure complications and side-effects occur, as with any medical intervention but unless those are more frequent and/or serious than the effects of the unchecked infectious disease would be, vaccinating would make more sense than not vaccinating.

This is one situation in which personal experience with an intervention is trumped by overall good. It must be devastating to have a child experience vaccine complications but having the whole child population not vaccinated because of those fears would probably be much more tragic. Just ask the parents from the 1900’s who lost children to diseases whose names we can’t even spell today…