As someone who has always understood that vaccines are safe and necessary, who vaccinates his children, I’m asking you to hear me out.
I don’t think that you are either stupid, uneducated, crazy, or that questioning vaccine safety is always associated with believing in conspiracy theories.
I understand and appreciate that you do care about your children, that you care about their health, and that you want what’s best for your family.
I actually do get that. I really do.
But I know that while you believe that you have done years of research and investigation to help you decide that the potential benefits of vaccines don’t outweigh their risks, going out of your way to find information to support your decision and ignoring all of the rest that says you are wrong, isn’t really doing research.
Whether you have never set foot on a college campus, you have a PhD in immunology, or you are a toxicologist, I know that you are still vulnerable to the same cognitive biases, heuristics, and logical fallacies as everyone else, and those can keep you from coming to a truly informed decision.
And I know that you are mostly motivated by fear, anger, and mistaken ideas of vaccine injury, vaccine induced disease, and unexplained illness and sudden deaths.
We all care about our children and families. The difference between us is that you still believe that there are two sides to the vaccination debate.
There isn’t.
Vaccines are safe, necessary, and they work well to protect our kids from life-threatening vaccine-preventable diseases.
No, vaccines are not 100% safe and they don’t work 100% of the time, but neither are they responsible for all of the things you see in vaccine scare stories or all of the so-called vaccine induced diseases we hear about.
“What if doctors never actually learn about vaccines, their ingredients, or adverse events, in medical school? What if the medical textbooks are written with an enormous amount of funding from the pharmaceutical industry? What if the CDC owns patents on vaccines? What if the pharmaceutical industry is corrupt and funds studies which conveniently stop monitoring test subjects before adverse effects begin to manifest? What if vaccines contain toxic substances at levels which can cause chronic illness when children are repeatedly injected with them? What if we are trading temporary illness for the development of autoimmune and neurological disease later in life? What if the threat and danger of these “preventable” diseases has been inflated to push more vaccines? What if these vaccines are not even truly effective as we have been led to believe and we will always need more booster shots to try to make up for that fact? What if there is evidence for all of the above, you just haven’t seen it yet?”
Ashley Everly Cates
Listen.
If you don’t want to vaccinate your kids, then don’t.
But don’t be influenced by folks who say they have done their research and don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but use a book by Neil Z Miller as a reference and push every major anti-vaccine conspiracy theory.
And don’t expect that your vaccine choice will be consequence free, including that your child will be at increased risk to get a vaccine-preventable disease, you will be putting others at risk to get a vaccine-preventable disease if your intentionally unvaccinated child gets sick, and you may be kept out of daycare or school if you live in a state that doesn’t allow non-medical exemptions.
I hope that you will keep an open mind and genuinely take time to look into this for yourself, beyond the myths and claims of anti-vaccine heroes who ignore or are unaware of the massive amount of evidence that contradict their claims.
Please take caution and know that I don’t do this to be popular. I don’t do this to make friends, get likes on my Facebook page, or sell vitamins and supplements in an online store.
Truly. The only reason I speak out is to protect my children and your children from unnecessary harm.
After all, is it really so hard to believe that the great majority of pediatricians, infectious disease specialists, immunologists, toxicologists, and public health experts in the world and throughout history are right about vaccines?
More for Anti-Vaxxers
- I used to be a vaccine skeptic. Now I’m a believer.
- Why I wish my daughter had been vaccinated
- I Used To Be Anti-Vaccine
- I was Duped by the Anti-Vaccine Movement
- Learning the Hard Way: My Journey from #AntiVaxx to Science
- I Didn’t Vaccinate My Child—And I Regret It
- Some Parents Fall for Vaccination Scare Stories, with Deadly Results
- Psychological Biases Play A Part In Vaccination Decisions
- The media’s MMR hoax
- The MMR story that wasn’t
- WHO – Impact of rumours and crises
- Evaluating Vaccines Requires Critical Thinking
- Letting go of the Paradigm of Fear
- Why are we so afraid of vaccines?
- Vaccines: Separating Fact from Fear
- Public Health Takes on Anti-Vaccine Propaganda: Damage done, Challenges Ahead
- How the Media Fed the Anti-Vaccine Movement
- WHO – Risk Perception
- Study – Epidemiology of vaccine hesitancy in the United StatesEpidemiology of vaccine hesitancy in the United States
- Vaccination: The Anatomy of Fear (incl. Soundtrack)
- Cognitive Biases in Health Care Decision Making
- Genotypes, Serotypes and the MMR: Cognitive Dissonance in Action
- Fear of Vaccines Goes Viral
- The Psychology of Anti-Vaxers: How Story Trumps Science
- Study – Free-Riding Behavior in Vaccination Decisions: An Experimental Study
- Study – The Roles of Altruism, Free Riding, and Bandwagoning in Vaccination Decisions
- Study – Vaccine Hesitancy: Causes, Consequences, and a Call to Action.
- Study – ‘Hesitant compliers’: Qualitative analysis of concerned fully-vaccinating parents
- Study – Bounded rationality alters the dynamics of paediatric immunization acceptance
- Study – Cognitive processes and the decisions of some parents to forego pertussis vaccination for their children.
- Study – Examining Sentiments and Popularity of Pro- and Anti-Vaccination Videos on YouTube
- Study – Understanding those who do not understand: a brief review of the anti-vaccine movement.
- Study – Public fear of vaccination: separating fact from fiction.
- Book – The Panic Virus
- Book – Deadly Choices
- Book – Autism’s False Prophets
Last Updated on May 17, 2018