The public health medicine community (CDC and others) brought this problem on by continually piling on shots for diseases that while terrible, don’t generally cause epidemics.
My father was a polio survivor and so I am a huge believer in vaccines, but the current schedule is excessive and that’s the main reason for the revolt against it.
I had my children in the mid-nineties when they introduced the Hep-B vaccine to be given to newborns. This is because the hospitals didn’t want to profile mothers as a risk factor (sex worker or IV drug user), so we’ll just vaccinate everyone.
The basic dishonesty involved is offensive to pretty much the rest of us moms who may be distracted by our busy lives, but we aren’t stupid and we don’t like jabbing our babies repeatedly for things that are NOT actual risks.
If they backed the schedule down and did honest and intelligent lifestyle risk assessments with the parents, they’d find a lot higher rates of compliance.
The HPV one is especially offensive, IMHO.
I don’t have children but if I did I think I would take your approach. I would want them to be vaccinated for the things I was vaccinated for in the fifties, but not turned into a pincushion.
As I said yesterday on another health-related thread, not everything is about politics and we do ourselves a disservice when we see everything through that prism. And we do ourselves a disservice when we never see things through that prism, too, of course.
Just a few days ago on the news, I heard that they’ve decided that vaccinations have 0% to do with autism. Yes, it was the MSM. But Stephen Barrett on quackwatch.org has been saying that for years. I know that Barrett is sometimes too much of a zero-tolerance hard nose even for me, but I prefer him to the “health news” and advice from Coast to Coast, Newsmax, Michael Savage and the usual suspects. Have you ever wondered why the anti- vax crowd and their friends are always complaining about the greed of Big Pharma and other conspirators, yet they themselves are usually selling something—books, vitamins, etc.? Just saying.
I’m no scientist, but my theory about the upsurge in autism is that in addition to more diagnoses(in the old days people with Aspergers may have just been thought odd), its something genetic. I think that’s what they will find.