Anti-vaccine parents who skip or delay their child’s vaccines think that they are doing the right thing for their kids.
They aren’t.
What Anti-Vaccine Parents Get Wrong
There are no benefits to skipping or delaying vaccines – only extra risks.
What’s the biggest risk? That their child will get a vaccine-preventable disease while they are unprotected.
And the risks aren’t only to their own children. Being unvaccinated and unprotected, they can get sick and put others at risk of getting sick too. This includes those who are too young to be vaccinated, too young to be fully vaccinated and protected, and those who may have a compromised immune system and can’t be vaccinated.
Mostly though, anti-vaccine parents have wrong ideas about:
- the benefits of vaccines – while vaccine advocates admit that vaccines are neither 100% safe nor 100% effective, you rarely see anti-vaccine folks admit that vaccines have benefits, as that would create too much cognitive dissonance for them
- shedding – everything you have read about vaccine shedding and “shedding season” likely isn’t true
- the risks of vaccines – although vaccines are not 100% safe, as I have already said, anti-vaccine folks typically overstate their risks, making you think that they cause all of the vaccine injuries and vaccine-induced diseases that you read about online
- the benefits of natural immunity – while natural immunity is great, it is important to understand that it comes with a cost – you have to survive a disease to get those benefits, and not everyone does, at least not without some complications
- forced vaccination – a vaccine mandate to attend school is not forced vaccination
- the risks of vaccine-preventable diseases – most folks don’t understand the true risks of vaccine-preventable diseases anymore because vaccines work so well to keep them under control, but it is important to remember that these are life-threatening diseases and we will see more outbreaks and more deaths and complications if they continue to come back
- the risks of getting sick – if you are unvaccinated and unprotected and hiding in the herd, you are at risk to catch a vaccine-preventable disease
- Big Pharma conspiracies – it is silly to think that we have been able to keep a global Big Pharma conspiracy about vaccines a secret
- toxins – there are no toxic ingredients in vaccines
- the risk of getting others sick – who else is going to get sick if you start an outbreak? Someone who is too young to be vaccinated or can’t be vaccinated because they have a problem with their immune system?
- vaccine choice – since there is no forced vaccination, talk of vaccine choice is simply anti-vaccine folks complaining because they don’t like all of the choices they have been given, even as they are very happy to take away the choice of the rest of us to not have to worry about outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases
- placebos – although they are now fixated on this, it is important to keep in mind that a placebo doesn’t have to be saline or an inert substance, a standard that is only set by anti-vaccine folks
What else do anti-vaccine parents get wrong?
They are very wrong if they are making the right decision in skipping or delaying their child’s vaccines.
More on What Anti-Vaccine Parents Get Wrong
- Dear Anti-Vaxxers,
- Ask 8 Questions Before You Skip a Vaccine
- Answers To Frequently Asked Questions About Immunizations
- 100 Myths About Vaccines
- Anti-Vaccine Points Refuted A Thousand Times
- 10 Reasons You Aren’t Vaccinating Your Kids
- WHO – Six common misconceptions about immunization
- HHS – Five Important Reasons to Vaccinate Your Child
- ‘Don’t be taken in by anti-vaccine myths on social media’
- Vaccine Myths Debunked
- 100 bad arguments against vaccines
- Don’t Be Distracted by Vaccine Myths and Misinformation
- The 20 Most Frequent Objections to Vaccinations
- Tactics and Tropes of the Antivaccine Movement
- IAC Answers Your Vaccine Questions
- Nine Questions, Nine Answers.
- WHO – What are some of the myths – and facts – about vaccination?