Have you heard about the idea of vaccine choice?
The “right to choose” is being pushed by anti-vaccine groups in many states because they think that laws mandating kids to have vaccines to go to daycare, school, and college violates their parental rights and civil liberties.
“Their claim that vaccines are 100% safe and effective for all people all of the time is not based in science and is not supported by facts or evidence, making it more of a religious belief than an adequate basis for their mandate argument.”
Texans for Vaccine Choice
And of course, they use a lot of anti-vaccine talking points to try and scare parents into believing them. Vaccines are safe and they work, but no one says that they are 100% safe or that they are 100% effective.
What Is Vaccine Choice?
Right away, you should see another big problem with the vaccine choice movement.
No one is forcing anyone to get vaccinated. Everyone has a choice. It’s just that some folks don’t like the consequences that come with that choice of not vaccinating their kids – having to home school their kids instead of going to a public or private school.
So basically, vaccine choice is just the anti-vaccine movement moving the goal posts yet again.
“If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the measles or the autism, we will stand in line for the f–king measles.”
Jenny McCarthy
Study after study showed that vaccines are not associated with autism and what did we get, measles outbreaks in unvaccinated kids.
What’s Missing In the Vaccine Choice Argument?
In addition to facts, one big thing that is missing from the vaccine choice argument is that by pushing the idea that unvaccinated kids should be allowed to skip or delay any or all vaccines without consequences, that takes away the choice for the rest of us who want to keep our kids protected from vaccine-preventable diseases.
Can’t we just vaccinate our kids?
We do!
But that doesn’t take away all of the risk if you don’t vaccinate your kids.
“…the increased risk of disease in the pediatric population, in part because of increasing rates of vaccine refusal and in some circumstances more rapid loss of immunity, increases potential exposure of immunodeficient children.”
Medical Advisory Committee of the Immune Deficiency Foundation
There are kids who are too young to be vaccinated or fully vaccinated, kids who can’t be vaccinated because of true medical vaccine exemptions, and folks whose vaccine didn’t work, after all, vaccines aren’t 100% effective.
The “choice” folks don’t talk about those things though.
Make an informed choice about vaccines before you think about leaving your child unvaccinated and unprotected.
What To Know About Vaccine Choice
Listen to anti-vaccine propaganda, skip or delay vaccines and leave your kids unprotected or do your research and understand that vaccines work and are safe and necessary and get them vaccinated and protected – that’s your vaccine choice.
More on Vaccine Choice
- Is Vaccinating a Private Choice?
- Mixing unvaccinated children with vaccinated children: Whose rights prevail?
- Maine Coalition for Vaccine Choice legislation–bad premises, bad law
- Vermont Coalition for Vaccine Choice Pick Cherries to Sow Fear
- Deadly Choices about vaccination
- To the Parent of the Unvaccinated Child Who Exposed my Family to Measles
- One more time: Vaccine refusal endangers everyone, not just the unvaccinated
- Why Worry About the Unvaccinated?
- Is my unvaccinated family putting my child at risk?
- Study – Association Between Vaccine Refusal and Vaccine-Preventable Diseases in the United States. A Review of Measles and Pertussis
- Protecting Those Who Need It Most
- Why I won’t let unvaccinated people around my kids
- Report – Medical Advisory Committee of the Immune Deficiency Foundation. Recommendations for live viral and bacterial vaccines in immunodeficient patients and their close contacts
- No Science, No Choice: Children’s Vulnerability to CAM and Pseudoscience
There are a ton of people who are running around without titters to the MMR in and of itself who got the MMR at a young age and it wore off. Titters are not a routine preventative so we blame a small amount of unvaccinated children as the culprit. We should come up with 1000 new vaccines (anti cancer etc) and make all adults get them when there titters run out so no one is at risk. Keep all records in tacked so we can see how chronically ill everyone becomes and then stick our thumb up our asses as to why.