Condensing it down...
Considering that there is a really good chance that the original strain might have been a death sentence for young children and the same would be true today if if a large percentage of the US population stopped vaccinating their children, it would be foolish to not get the shots because it MIGHT mutate sometime in the future.
It doesn't make a bit of sense.
You do know that most of these childhood diseases are not deadly, right? You know they are easily treatable, right? Before the chicken pox vaccine was instituted, about 184 people per year died from it. One hundred eight-four deaths per year in age groups across the board should mean the forced vaccination of every single child in the US?! I disagree with this way of thinking.
Let me spell it out for you.
Vaccination works. For a while. Just like antibiotics. Eventually though, the strain you use in your vaccine becomes extinct. It is replaced by ones that you do NOT vaccinate for. That were ALWAYS there in the natural circulating wildtype population. And more that have room to ‘grow’ due to the extinction of the predominant strain you used in the vaccine. Those seem to be, for pertussis example, WAY more virulent than the one you started with.
And now they become the dominant strain and your vaccine is worthless. Like penicillin became in the 70’s and 80’s.
I still remember when public health officials wanted to put antibiotics in the water supply in the 60’s and 70’s. Just as bad an idea.
When you play natural selection games with the bugs they win. Every time. We have one generation every 20+ years. Bugs have several every single day. They have plenty of time to throw genetic spaghetti against the wall. And win.
And what was a childhood disease with X mortality becomes a disease EVERYONE can get but now you have X + Y mortality where Y is a huge number.
And that childhood disease threatens to become a new pandemic. That you have limited ability to treat. Because you never really learned to TREAT that disease because your only ‘prevention’ was the vaccine.
Lather, rinse, repeat.