First of all, the docs don't make money on giving immunizations.
Pediatricians are among the lowest paid of the medical practices
I think that you should have a choice and not get your kids immunized, but live with the consequences of your choice.
In other words when your kid gets polio, tetanus, hepatitis, measles or rabies or whatever.... don't sit there and whine about your kid dying, brain damaged or needing a transplant. If a pregnant woman comes in contact with your kid that is a relative, don't whine about the birth defects....
Some of the people on this board are old enough to remember our parents getting nervous in the summer about who was going to get polio.
I think that the number of vaccinations and the schedule is a lot of the problem. What they load little 2 month old babies with is ridiculous, and then again at 4 and 6 months. It could be that there may be some connection between the shear number of vaccinations and not the components.
Nowhere in nature do you see a child coming down with several diseases at once and at such a young age. When diseases run their course, they happen one at a time and are spaced apart. I think this vaccination schedule is overloading an immature immune system. Plus, they apparently aren’t particularly effective until two when the final set is administered; until they are teens, that is, and they need them again.
That being said, I also think some of the vaccinations are unnecessary, chicken pox in particular. I would never pass on tetanus or polio. Rabies is not given unless there’s need to but one would have to be a fool to pass on that one.
Other diseases, like measles, rubella, and mumps, and chickenpox, IMO, are better to have gotten in childhood. If someone doesn’t, then the vaccinations are in order, especially for someone planning on becoming pregnant or someone who didn’t get the childhood disease as a child. I think they should be a back up, not a first line of defense. Having the disease almost always confers lifelong immunity, something vaccinations don’t do; they need to be repeated, if they are effective in the first place, and often a percentage of them aren’t. Not very safe for those who think they’re OK.
I know that there can be complications from some of these, but with the medical advances with anti-biotics and anti-inflammatories, complications like meningitis can be treated or prevented. And people who don’t have the immunity they think they do can be in danger from those things anyway.