Jesus fuck this makes me so mad. I am just gonna copy paste my story because my hands are shaking too much to type it out.
Tldr vaccinate your fucking kids you assholes, this can and does kill people.
When I was a baby, I was allergic to the pertussis component of the TDaP vaccine. I'm not 100% sure how serious my reaction was - my mother just says I turned bright red and screamed for 3 days straight afterwards. When she told my pediatrician, the pediatrician said it was safe to not vaccinate against pertussis, as herd immunity would protect me. So the rest of my vaccines were tetanus and diphtheria only.
Fast forward to when I'm 8 years old. My family and I are traveling up to a family vacation spot like we did pretty much every weekend when I was a kid. We stop at a McDonald's. I play with the other kids in the little play area. My mom remembers a couple of them being sick, but I don't think I was paying attention. We eat, pile back into the car, and off we go.
Maybe a week later I start feeling sick. It looks like a cold, but I keep getting worse instead of better. My mild cough turns into horrible coughing fits, where I cough until there's no air left in my body ... it feels like I'm suffocating (because I am) until some instinct kicks in and my lungs reinflate with a horrible sucking gasping sound. I start coughing up blood and throwing up from my coughing fits.
My mom is terrified and my doctor (eventually a small team of doctors) is baffled. Remember, this was 1994, when the anti-vaccination movement was still pretty new. No one on my team had ever seen whooping cough before; it was just something you read about in a textbook, not something anyone actually *gets* these days.
They treated me for pneumonia, for bronchitis, for asthma and croup and I don't know how many other things. I just remember lots of pills and syrups and inhalers and a nebulizer that tasted like ghosts.
Finally, my mom saw a segment on the local news about an outbreak of pertussis (whooping cough) in the area where we had been travelling. The epicenter of the outbreak was a charter school that had a high population of "persona exemption" unvaccinated kids. She looked up pertussis in one of her family medicine books (which she'd been reading like a fiend since I got sick) and the symptoms fit me perfectly.
The doctors didn't believe her at first. They thought she was being overdramatic and overprotective. It took her ages to convince them to test me. Lo and behold, it's whooping cough! They start giving me the proper treatment, and I s.l.o.w.l.y start to get better.
Most of my memories of that summer are pretty dim. I remember waking up in the mornings covered in blood that I'd coughed up in my sleep; I had to sleep with towels covering the bed because I kept ruining my sheets and blankets. I remember my mom sleeping next to me on the floor so she could wake up and give me medicine when I woke up coughing. That medicine tasted like death (I used to cry and scream when they'd try to give it to me), so she'd mix it with a glass of fruity sparkling water to get me to drink it. I didn't know how to swallow pills, so she would crush them up and mix them with these orange sherbet Flintstone's push-up ice cream pop things. (I still can't eat sherbet without throwing up.) I remember her holding me, rocking me as I cried because I was in so much pain from coughing. Each fit was agonizing, and I would cry because I knew another one would always come and I was helpless to stop it. I remember being rushed to the pharmacy, literally being picked up and carried into the car and then out again to the counter, for an emergency dose of some medication or another, I think it was an injection. It was loud and scary and chaotic and I didn't fully understand what was going on, just that everyone around me was terrified.
Most of all, I remember being really angry that the Lion King came out that summer, and I was too sick to go see it. Clearly I had priorities.
What I don't remember, because no one told me at the time, was just how serious this all really was. My parents and doctors were very reassuring, and I was too young to really understand the severity of the disease. My mom didn't tell me this until years later, but they had wanted to put me in the hospital in case I started to ... well, her exact words were, "They wanted me to put you in the hospital, but I said no because I wanted you to die at home."
I was incredibly sick for months, continuing to throw up and cough up blood for about a year after I first got sick. (I'd start coughing if I laughed too hard, so you can imagine my asshole siblings got a kick out of taking advantage of that.)
The long and short of it is, I lived. If I'd been even a little bit younger, or if my mom hadn't caught that news segment, or if my doctors had waited just a little longer to start proper treatment... who knows.
But I lived, and dammit, I'm angry.
This should not have happened to me. This shouldn't happen to *anyone*. Diseases like whooping cough, measles, rubella, polio... they're all absolutely *terrifying*. They can kill, they can maim, they can leave a person permanently disabled or brain-damaged.
Every time I hear someone say they're not vaccinating due to a risk of autism (or whatever the big scary syndrome is that week), I want to either start screaming or punch somebody. It takes everything in me to remain calm and rational and explain that (1) those are quite simply not things that happen as a result of vaccinating and (2) even if they were, do you really prefer a dead child over an autistic one? Vaccines are some of the most highly tested, carefully monitored substances in the medical world. They go through years or decades of trials and are constantly being reevaluated for safety and efficacy. The current recommended vaccine schedule wasn't just designed on a whim - it's been developed over the course of 50 years by three separate, independent medical organizations (ACIP, AAP, and AAFP, if you're interested) that are NOT in fact paid by Big Pharma or the government to trick you into things you don't need. Vaccines aren't some vast conspiracy to make the pharmaceutical companies millions, since they actually lose money on each vaccine they produce. (If they cared only about the bottom line, they'd let you get sick and sell you the medicine to make you better. There's more profit in disease than prevention.) Your doctor isn't giving your child shots because it's fun; they're doing it to spare your child from needless suffering.
There has not been one single case of a vaccination causing autism. NOT ONE. Every study, every exam, every peer-reviewed paper on the subject comes to the same conclusion: vaccines don't cause autism, they save lives.
The reason medical science even developed these vaccines in the first place was because the diseases can be *devastating*. Polio can cause permanent paralysis and deformities in the hips and legs. Measles can cause nerve damage which may become permanent, as well as permanent brain damage or death from encephalitis and meningitis. Rubella can cause fatal encephalitis and internal bleeding. Mumps can leave you deaf, infertile, and brain damaged.
These aren't colds. They're not even the flu. They're fatal, debilitating, AND UTTERLY PREVENTABLE.
WHY WHY WHY WOULD YOU EVEN RISK THE POSSIBILITY OF YOUR CHILD GETTING THESE DISEASES?! NOTHING IS WORTH THIS RISK. NOTHING.
This brings me to herd immunity. What the doctors told my parents was true - in a vaccinated community, I would have been totally fine. Vaccines work when everyone or nearly everyone has them. Whooping cough can't gain a foothold in a community if 99% of the people there are protected form it. One protected person gets exposed, and it goes nowhere. One unprotected person gets exposed and they get sick, but the protected people around them don't. It's like hitting a brick wall. The disease doesn't infect the community. The problem comes about when too much of the community goes unvaccinated, and "too much" varies by disease. For measles, a whopping 90-95% of people need to be vaccinated in order to protect the entire population. Yet there are schools out there where 80% of the children are NOT vaccinated. And that puts *everyone* at risk.
There will always be a segment of the population that cannot be vaccinated. It consists of people like me, who are allergic to a vaccine; young children, who may be too young to vaccinate or who haven't had all their doses and are still vulnerable; the elderly, whose immune systems are weaker and whose immunity may have worn off; and those with weakened immune systems, who are more susceptible to disease and cannot be vaccinated without risking contracting the disease.
Whenever a parent chooses not to vaccinate, they are not only putting their own child at risk - they are putting at risk everybody around them who is vulnerable. They are saying that the risk of autism (or, again, whatever the current unfounded fear is) is scarier to them than the risk of letting their child and possibly dozens of others get sick and maybe die. They are saying that they don't care if I, or someone like me, lives or dies.
I don't want to die. I don't want my child to die, or for her to watch a friend die of an illness that should have disappeared when my own parents were babies. I don't want that sweet old man down the street, who blows the pine needles out of my driveway every month because he thinks his leafblower is the most awesome invention ever, to die. I don't want someone whose immune system is shot due to cancer or illness or age or medication OR ANYTHING AT ALL to die just because some asshole ignorant fucknugget thinks 3 minutes on google is better than a medical degree.
