I’m a vaccine refuser. There, I said it.

I’m not the only one but it’s easy to feel alone. My peers are more likely to admit to drug use, infidelity, or not recycling than they are to admitting feeling uncomfortable with vaccines. 

I am unvaccinated. At 38 years old, having travelled the world as a baby and an adult, I should probably be dead, right? My 19 year old daughter is unvaccinated. My two-year old son is unvaccinated. We’re basically three generations of unvaccinated people. Why would I, an ordinary woman with an ordinary respect for the medical establishment, dig in her heels and refuse vaccines for my children and myself?

I’m not afraid of childhood diseases. Well, not as afraid as I am of vaccine injury

Measles can cause blindness. Polio, paralysis. Rubella, birth defects. All of these diseases are avoidable or treatable, with little to no long-term effect. Vaccine injury is largely irreversible, especially in a medical climate that barely admits the existence of vaccine injuries much less examines ways to treat them.

Vaccination does not equal immunisation

If a vaccine really could provide true immunity, I would be first in line with my sleeve rolled up. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as just prodding the immune system to produce antibodies. Not all antibodies are created equal, and the presence of antibodies does not in itself mean immunity. Read the manufacturer’s insert of any vaccine, they’ll tell you the same thing. And yes, reducing immunology to a couple of sentences does make me cringe. Sorry.

The myth of herd immunity

Herd immunity is a mathematical model. The idea is that if enough of us are immune to a disease, the disease will be confounded by our barrier of immunity, stopped in its tracks, reducing the likelihood of reaching newborns, the elderly, and the immuno-compromised. Herd immunity is often invoked in pro-vaccine campaigns; a kind of ‘take one for the team’ attitude that implies only a heartless person would refuse a vaccine if they could save someone who isn’t able to be vaccinated because of their age or damaged immune system. There are three widely accepted models of herd immunity (yes, there are more than one) and none of them apply to us. A herd is a group of cattle — strike one. A herd is a relatively stable group; rarely does a new member arrive from afar or an old member leave on a jet plane for new horizons — strike two. All of the well-accepted models of herd immunity are built on the assumption of natural immunity, not the dubious and temporary immunity conferred by vaccines — strike three.

Vaccines are administered with no attention to individual health

My son has a family history of auto-immune disease on his father’s side. He has a sensitivity to bovine proteins — all milk and beef products, even tiny traces, affect his breathing, his mood, his sleeping patterns, and his skin. I have no idea what levels of heavy metals are present in his body or any information about how his body processes them. None of this information was requested or raised at his first ‘well-child’ appointment (well child — more ridiculous terms). Contrary to stereotype, I am not looking for a fight at the mere mention of vaccines. All I did was ask three questions: which vaccines our doctor wanted to administer, what brands they were (the level of heavy metals varies according to brand) and whether they were cultured on bovine materials. I was met with a blank look and handed a pamphlet that said little more than Shots Are Good, Get Them. After declining that round of vaccines and dealing with the subsequent pressure and disapproval (things I have come to call the side-effects of vaccine refusal) I relayed the story to my partner, fully expecting him to trot out the party line “they wouldn’t recommend them if they weren’t safe.” Instead he was concerned that our doctor was less interested in gaining an understanding of our son’s individual makeup before discussing vaccine options, and more interested in administering the vaccines before moving on to her next appointment.

The Hippocratic Oath

Doctors no longer swear to Apollo, Panacea, and the other gods of healing. But once upon a time this quaint little piece of history was uttered by every new doctor, binding them to a set of ethics that ensured good conduct. Debatable translations aside, two lines are relevant here:

1. Primum non nocere (first/primarily, do no harm)
2. I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect

By implying that a vaccine is a ‘deadly drug’ I realise I am coming close to the hysterical stereotype of a mother who applies Calendula cream to a broken arm and realigns chakras to treat cancer. However, I am increasingly worried that we (the general public) don’t really have all the data we need to give informed consent.

Informed consent

Informed consent is what we give when our medicos have clearly explained the risks and benefits of a treatment then given us time to think about our answer. This doesn’t happen with vaccination. It is a rare and wonderful doctor who explains exactly what the package inserts mean, the ingredient list of the vaccine, what the possible effects of the individual vaccine are, and the long-term implications of the current vaccination schedule for your child. Even the most open-minded doctor may not know any more than you or I know. Vaccine effects are not a standard part of most medical-school curricula and there are exactly zero long-term studies on the effects of multiple vaccines. In order to conduct these studies, there would need to be a control group of people who never receive vaccines. Despite many vaccine-refusing parents offering themselves and their children to be part of just such a group, it is considered unethical to withhold ‘potentially life saving’ vaccines in order to study long term vaccine effects. So we really have no idea what they do, unless we listen to the often-dismissed anecdotes of parents who just know that their child was damaged by vaccines. Without information, informed consent does not exist.

Lack of accountability

It is illegal in the United States to sue a vaccine manufacturer for vaccine damage. In the most litigious country on the planet, withholding the right to sue is like withholding the right to breathe. Surely not!

This odd situation came about after vaccine manufacturers threatened to stop making vaccines if they weren’t protected by law from money-grubbing little people and their money-grubbing lawyers. In other words, class-action suits. Let’s pretend that the US government acts in the best interests of the people: if vaccines are no longer available, children will die. I think that removing vaccines would have been the best possible move, but it wasn’t my decision to make. So the pharmaceutical companies were protected from civil suits. Instead, a small cost was tacked on to every vaccine (a cost that you pay when you buy the vaccine). That cost is pooled in a payout fund attached to a ‘vaccine court’ where parents of vaccine injured children must prove their case in order to receive a pitifully small payout. What’s pitifully small? If your baby dies from a vaccine, he or she is worth up to a quarter of a million dollars, with many payouts being substantially less. Despite the payouts being pitifully small, more than two billion dollars have been paid out since the inception of this system. Two billion dollars worth of vaccine injuries, many of them involving deaths originally attributed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). By the way, before widespread vaccination, SIDS was so rare it wasn’t even included on the tables of causes of infant mortality. Correlation doesn’t equal causation but surely that warrants a closer look.

The vaccine schedule is too crowded

When I was a baby, vaccination began at six months old. It consisted of exactly four vaccines: The DTP and Polio vaccines. When my daughter was born, vaccines began at 3 months and covered the more familiar MMR, HiB, DtaP and others. Now that my son is a toddler, he is looking at the full schedule plus optional chickenpox and Hepatitis B vaccines, beginning at 2 months. Babies in the US are exposed to vaccines in utero and given Hep B shots at birth. Not counting maternal vaccination during pregnancy, a normal US baby can expect to have 26 vaccines by the time he or she is 12 months old. Is more than two vaccines each month, every month, sometimes in bundles of five or more for the first year of life a reasonable amount? For me, the answer is no, and as I live in the Netherlands which has a vaccine schedule nowhere near as crowded as that of the US, but still pretty vaccine-happy, I decided to ‘delay.’ Forever.

Vaccines are a loss leader

You know that free t-shirt you get for visiting a local car dealership? It’s called a loss leader. The dealership eats the expense of the t-shirts in the hopes you will come back when you are ready to buy a car. Pharmaceutical companies don’t make a lot of money on vaccines. Sometimes they even lose money. But the medications for asthma, psoriasis, eczema, behavioural disorders, allergies, food sensitivities, arthritis, auto-immune diseases, multiple sclerosis, autism-related issues, sleep disorders, leukemias, Alzheimers disease, diabetes, and dementia are big business. These are just some of the problems that have been linked to over-vaccination. Not caused by, ok? Just linked to. Some people are not good candidates for vaccination and these unlucky people are the ones who will need the support of the pharmaceutical industry.

I don’t trust anyone but I listen to everyone

I read everything I can find on vaccines. Medical journals, doctor’s op-eds, studies, blogs, rants and musings from the pro-vaccine camp, the anti-vaccine camp, and the everything-inbetween camp. There’s nothing impartial under the sun. All I can do is keep an open mind and measure everything I find against the prime purpose: keeping my family healthy. The same purpose you also have, no doubt.

Let’s make a deal. I won’t call you sheeple if you don’t call me a conspiracy theorist. I won’t worry about your recently-vaccinated kids shedding the live virus if you don’t worry that my unvaccinated family is a seething pool of disease. The only way either of us will be proved right is if something terrible happens to one of our children. And that’s a shitty way to resolve an argument.