To any parents who are anti-vaccineor perhaps better described as vaccine-hesitantlet me say first that I can relate.
When I had my first daughter nearly nine years ago, like probably a good number of new moms, I was irrationally worried about my child’s safety (yes, I checked to make sure she was breathing every night!).
I closely followed online discussions about most parenting decisions, so I was well aware of that now infamous report, which claimed to find a link between autism and what we call the MMR vaccine (it stands for measles, mumps and rubella).
Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Vaccines are a matter of fact
Eight years ago, when it was time for my daughter to get her first MMR shot, I kind of freaked. I expressed my fears to my pediatrician, who is a big believer in homeopathic remedies, to give you a sense of how liberal she can be when it comes to modern medicine.
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“It is totally safe. The science is sound,” she assured me. I remember her saying words to that effect, but my mom gut wasn’t totally convinced. To placate me, she said we could do the shots separately. Instead of one vaccine, my daughter braved three different shots for measles, mumps and rubella. (She will have my head when she reads this!)
A few years later, that report was officially discredited, debunked, you name it. When my younger daughter was scheduled for her first MMR shot, my worries were dramatically reduced — so much so that I didn’t insist that we separate the vaccine into three different shots. I had the doctor give her the whole shebang.
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More disease = more vaccinations
Sadly, what may get more people to get on board and start vaccinating their children is more disease itself.
Offit recalled how his parents didn’t need to be convinced to be vaccinated because when they were young, teens died of diptheria, whooping cough killed 8,000 people a year and people got paralysis from polio.
“But for my children, who are 22 and 20, they not only don’t see these (diseases), they didn’t grow up with these diseases,” said Offit. “For all the talking we do, nothing talks louder than the virus itself or the disease.”
“And that’s what you are seeing now,” said Offit. People who have been on the fence about getting the measles vaccine themselves or getting the vaccine for their children are starting to get vaccinated because now they fear the disease, he said.
“It’s too bad it has to come to that because it’s always the children who suffer our ignorance and that’s certainly the truth here.”
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