Me not taking a vaccine harms nobody else. How can I harm you if your precious and perfect vaccine protects you.
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Not everyone who is vaccinated develops antibodies against the disease. For instance, my friend’s son contracted measles even though he had been fully and properly vaccinated. I did not respond to Hepatitis B vaccine even though I was properly and fully vaccinated.
Much of the effectiveness of vaccination comes from “herd” immunity. If most of the population is vaccinated the disease does not have an opportunity to spread.
If your child is not vaccinated and contracts a disease ( for example whopping cough) there is a real risk that your child will infect those children who have been vaccinated but did not responded, who are too young to have received the vaccine, or too sick. The greater the population of people who are not vaccinated, the greater is the opportunity for the disease to spread from one person to another through the community.
I am as libertarian as anyone can be, and it is **NOT** a libertarian ideal to make other people sick when there are highly effective measures to prevent it. And....As a libertarian, if a parent refuses to vaccinate his child, and his child is the reason others are made sick, then he should be bankrupt by lawsuits into complete state of penury.
Maybe parents should have their *fully and properly* vaccinated children tested to make sure they have the right antibodies to be able to go out into the world and risk being around the great unwashed. Maybe it’s the vaccine manufacturer’s fault for making a faulty vaccine. How do you know that you did not respond to the Hepatitis B vaccine? (just curious)
I just brought my kids for their checkups the other day. When they were young, I didn’t question the doctors on vaccinations, and I agreed to every single shot up through age 4. Because the recommendations for vaccinations change constantly, one child had 15 shots, another had 16, and another had 17... all before age 4.
Then I started refusing the shots. There were so many shots required in our state - at one point, our state required more immunization shots than any other state. There were more booster shots recommended at age 6 and then even more booster shots at age 11-12. Two different doctors jumped all over me for refusing further vaccinations, so I “fired” them (not the other way around).
When I took my kids for checkups the other day, I mentioned to the doctor that they never had their 11-12yo booster shots. He said: “Oh, we stopped giving those boosters at that age. Now we only give shots for chicken pox and meningitis at age 11-12.”
So, (1) the medical community continually changes its recommendations; (2) vaccination requirements even differ from state to state; and (3) when you agree to a vaccination, the doctor hands you information warning that a small percentage of patients will be harmed (sometimes fatally) by the shot itself. Those are a few reasons why the decision should be made by parents themselves. Whether we choose to vaccinate or not - or whether, like me, some parents pick and choose - the decision is ours to make.
To those of you who believe all children should receive all vaccinations, I would ask: Which vaccinations? How many? How many more vaccinations are you willing to add to the schedule? Will there ever be a limit?