[webstersII]

"Once the unvaccinated group reaches a 'critical mass', then even vaccinated children can get the disease (though usually in a milder form). A small number of kids can get a free ride because all the others are vaccinated, but when you get up into several thousand unvaccinated kids, the risks increase substantially."

That is so much baloney. Once the child is vaccinated the immunity they have available is the amount that the vaccination confers. Some vaccinations have a really low rate of immunity (some have less than 70%), others have much higher. It has nothing to do with the number of sick kids around them.

"I'm not quite old enough to remember when they closed the swimming pools because of polio epidemics"

Then you will be interested to learn that the only cases of polio in this country in the last 10 or so years were caused by the vaccination. The live polio virus can cause polio.

[Freedom4US]

Yep. And if the vaccine were invented today it probably wouldn’t be marketed. This ain’t the 50s! It sucks, but hundreds of millions are free from the scourge of polio as a result.

[fetal heart beats by 21st day]

Yes, I had a friend with a child who contracted polio from the live vaccine, and another whose child developed juvenile rheumatism after the alternative pertussis.

He takes shots of something(long-term effects unknown) because otherwise he cannot walk and is in pain around the clock.

[AnAmericanMother]

"Last ten or so years" versus 1955, fifty years ago . . . that's the difference. According to the CDC, there were between 15 and 20 THOUSAND cases of the paralytic form of polio reported every year before 1955 - and that's only the serious cases, many thousands more had mild symptoms or were asymptomatic carriers.

Live vaccines always carry a risk, and it's not rare when you get it, as they say. That's why the U.S. has switched to the killed vaccine. But I think most people would consider that 150 total cases in the twenty years from 1980 to 1999 is a big improvement over 400,000 cases for the same period preceding 1955.