Don’t Hate, Vaccinate!

I am a father, a physician, and have a master’s degree in biochemistry. As a father I know all parents want a healthy child and a life for their child. As a father and physician I know that there are diseases that exist that could possibly harm my children. These diseases include those caused by communicable infections and those caused by possible environmental toxins or injuries.

As a parent we all believe that our babies and children are “perfect.” But no matter how perfect I believe my newborn to be, I know that on their own they will not survive. There are actions we can take that improve their health and vitality. First and foremost is the choice for the mother to breastfeed. One of the benefits is by breastfeeding the mother is passing on passive immunity to the child. Mom’s immunity supports the baby’s immunity! But when the breastfeeding stops that additional immunity stops.

So my children haven’t been exposed to the same illnesses their mom or I have. So they don’t carry the same immunity that we have. Also both my wife and I have a lifetime of immunizations. So we decided to immunize our children. In addition this decision protects other children that we don’t even know.

It is my responsibility as a parent to do the best I can to protect my children. It is my responsibility, obligation, and privilege to protect all children as a physician. Obviously we cannot protect our children against everything. We cannot put our children in a bubble and avoid all of the world’s bumps and bruises along the way. So as parents and society we have to make informed, rational, and smart choices to protect our children and the health of our society.

Some parents don’t want to immunize their children for fear of putting something foreign into their perfect babies. What does that mean? Are we so narcissist that we don’t realize that we enjoy an epidemiological advantage due to the majority of our population having historically gotten immunized? That prior to these public health program perfect babies died all the time due to infectious diseases. And others were left with neurological sequelae. Are we so narcissistic that we don’t recognize our connectedness to others and that our choices won’t harm others. Education is a factor; we are woefully unprepared to understand the nuances of a scientific education. Yet we used to trust those that went through the rigors of such training.

Rather some trust celebrity more. Some trust a former playboy bunny more than individuals who have dedicated their lives and minds to promoting health. Unfortunately there is the occasional physician – who cares more for celebrity and money or power than actually following their oath. The only physician in England who falsified data to tie a correlation between vaccinations and autism has had his license to practice removed. He did such damage that he is untrustworthy to practice. You might find one or two physicians claiming the same but the clinical evidence is overwhelming in favor of immunizations. I am not part of big pharma and the majority of my colleagues are not either. We only care about practicing sound evidence based medicine.

I have good friends that have had children with autism or Asperger’s disease.

I had one friend in particular from college who is certain that the vaccinations caused the autism. She is certain because of the time line and how it was experienced. Her child was diagnosed with autism a few months after receiving the vaccinations. The problem with this thinking is that there are things that can be true and true but unrelated. In other words her child did get vaccinated prior to demonstrating symptoms of autism. Yet the development of the symptoms would have come at that time due to developmental staging and not vaccinations. I can empathize with her pain at having a child with such a difficult disability. But blaming something that did not cause the disability cannot ease the pain. Unfortunately we do not have a specific cause for autism at this time. But that does not make vaccinations the culprit. In fact continuing to promote vaccines as a cause of autism delays the possibility of finding the true cause or causes.

Vaccinations and immunizations do such good and prevent such horrific diseases such as polio, measles, mumps, rubella, meningitis, hepatitis, and tetanus. The evidence is clear that immunizations are good for our children and other children. We know that autism can be a terrible disease. We don’t know what actually causes it. There may be some environmental factors that are associated with it; we know enough to know that those environmental factors are not associated with vaccines. We need to look in other areas for a solution for autism. Clearly there are things in our environment that may be causing harm and we must search to continue to improve our overall health. But we should not dismiss what we already definitively know. We need to vaccinate our children because by not doing so we will knowingly bring back terrible diseases, which would be a selfish action. For every outbreak of a disease that is making a comeback due to the actions of those parents who have not vaccinated their children should be held accountable and responsible legally. It is possible one could argue that they are knowingly poisoning the environment and that they are committing hate crimes against their neighborhoods, schools, churches, and playgrounds. So Don’t Hate – Vaccinate.