elfs | Vaccination Madness

One of the things that happened this weekend was I got to listen to two people, one a parent of a very small child, discuss the relative merits of vaccination. The parent had joined up a mailing list of local parents in the area, the purpose of which was to alert the entire list if any one child caught a common childhood disease such as chickenpox or the measles, so that all of the children could be assembled into a big party and allowed to catch the disease.

The other man immediately commended him for his decision and started to deride all vaccinations as unnecessary and even dangerous, started ranting about mecury in vaccines, and went on for ten minutes in this vein. It seems the other conversant had stepped on one of his favorite subjects.

I held my tongue. I shouldn't have. There are three reasons why I think the father's decision is madness. First, there's no thimeresol (the mercury formulation used as a preservative) in the chickenpox vaccine. None. Pediatric vaccines are packaged in single-use preloads these days; the only vaccines in the US that contain thimersol are influenza vaccines, and that's mostly a function of the necessitated speed with which they're produced. Secondly, the risk of injury or illness from the chickenpox vaccine is less than one percent the risk of injury or illness from chickenpox itself. Chickenpox has a death rate, and it's surprisingly high for children under the age of 9, over 50 deaths a year. The vaccine, so far as we know, hasn't killed anyone.

More to the point, the anti-vaccination nuts put my kids at risk. At some point, when enough kids aren't immunized, you hit a tipping point where epidemics can rattle through an entire community and the viral impact load can be enough to make even the immunized kids sick.

If you want more of this, go read Respectful Insolence and in his search column type "vaccines". He deals with these people on a pretty frequent basis, and I must say he puts up a better fight than I do.