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WE survived . . . but some of our contemporaries did not.

And many more suffered lasting aftereffects. A school friend's baby brother was blinded and brain-damaged as a result of measles encephalitis.

The other problem is that refusing to vaccinate, if it reaches critical mass, enables an epidemic to spread far and wide. The campaign to eradicate measles in the U.S. relied on vaccinating enough folks so that if one person from a measles area (like, say, the Philippines, which had an awful epidemic in the early 2000s, and some infected individuals came here) won't cause the disease to spread like wildfire.

A school friend's baby brother was blinded and brain-damaged as a result of measles encephalitis.

I still vividly recall the day I brought my adopted daughter to the pediatrician for her first MMR shot. While sitting in the waiting room, I flipped through an issue of Time magazine with a fairly lengthy article on that particular vaccination. While it praised the benefits, it also noted that some children fared poorly including a few who died following the 3rd dose. Left in a quandary, I decided to follow the doctor's recommendation and she received the first of 3 injections.

My daughter struggled through elementary school, eventually assessed with dyslexia and later, ADHD. In speaking with her birth mother, who had 2 other children, she said there was no history of dyslexia in the family and neither of her other children were handicapped with this condition, nor did they have ADHD. While I cannot prove anything one way or the other, gut feeling still tells me that something transpired through administration of that vaccination series.

How is it that a vaccine that makes you immune from a virus requires the action of any one else for it to be effective? If the vaccine truly makes you immune, then it should not matter what someone else decides to do. If you are immune from measles, then someone with measles should be able to cough, slobber on you, or kiss you(or just live peacefully without the government and it guns imposing its will on them) without having an adverse effect on your health.