I hate vaccines.
I cry when my kids cry. I hate to see them hurt. I want to wrap them in bubble wrap and cut out a hole for breathing. That way they’ll never get hurt. I have spent five years taking Celaya for her shots. Last year she screamed in abject terror and clutched me in her four year old death grip. I physically had to hold on to her, pressing her arm against her body, so the nurse could administer the shot. She then proceeded to cry for a good ten minutes. Not pretty.
Yesterday my four month old got three shots loaded with multiple vaccines shot into her chubby little thighs, two on one side, one on the other. She cried for a minute and then got over it. Yay? No such luck. Just as I feel a sore throat coming on last night, Matilda decides to get a nice low grade consistent fever that keeps her restless in her sleep and anxious to eat every three hours. Meanwhile my throat is killing me and I’m afraid to cough because I might wake the baby next to me whose hold on sleep is tenuous at best. I’m a fan of letting a low grade fever ride itself out as long as my children are not in pain because I know that a fever is good for the body’s immune system, and may even help the vaccine do its work. So I was awake and asleep awake and asleep awake and asleep. Finally, at 4AM, Matilda let out a little cry, and I said fuck it and gave her some Tylenol. She settled down, but now she was wide awake and looking at me with her little shocked eyes and cockatoo hair standing up on end. So, there I was, exhausted, throat on fire, rocking, swaying, bouncing in my bedroom to help her get back to sleep, so we could both pass out for a couple hours before Celaya woke up and came in for her good morning let’s all wake up now visit.
The fever never came back, and her spirits have improved. I know she’ll be fine by tomorrow.
But man I hate vaccines.
At the same time, I am so thankful for them. I’m proud to wave my yellow immunization card for each of my girls. And while I cringe at the idea of shots, I eagerly look forward to the opportunity to protect my kids a little bit more with each one. It’s a mixed bag of pain and pleasure.
I really don’t want to do it. But I really want the benefits. So I suck it up and I do it. Because it is what is best for my kids and best for my community.
So you can see why just the word vaccine infuriates me lately. It riles up all the fury I have over the fact that not vaccinating your children is even an issue, and quite a widespread one at that.
Recently I overheard a group of five year olds at an alternative school I was considering for my daughter discussing the fact that they’ve never had a shot. One poor little girl had just gotten her recent round of vaccines and the other kids were outraged: “what!? I’ve never gotten a shot!” “No! Me neither!”
The little girl taps me on the shoulder as I’m desperately trying to inch my infant out of the same breathing space as these little unvaccinated children and says, “Can you please tell them why it’s important to get your shots?”
I turn to the group of kids and say, firmly and matter of factly, “if you don’t get your shots you could get very sick and die.”
Needless to say, we will not be joining that school.
I’m not sorry. I have zero tolerance for parents that refuse to vaccinate their children, opening up the country to the return of all but eradicated diseases, and threatening herd immunity.
It is even more infuriating to me that this is a largely liberal cause, and I take pride in being a liberal on the basis of logic and humanitarianism. As a liberal I am all for personal choice. But refusal to vaccinate your child is not a personal choice, it is one that affects the community you live in.
We talk about choice and freedom in this country as if we all live isolated on islands and those choices don’t affect the people around us. You say it is your choice to eat unhealthy, smoke cigarettes, drink to excess, drive everywhere instead of walking, and it is true. Those are your choices, and I would not want legislation passed to mandate any of those choices away from you, but I would ask you to consider that your choice is not a personal one, it is a community one. Your health affects your family, who lose you or suffer with you if you die early or come down with a debilitating disease. It also affects the community, who must pay higher taxes and healthcare premiums to take care of the outcomes of our community members who are in poor health.
And your insistence that not vaccinating your children is a personal choice is the most egregious of all. Once enough people join together who have not vaccinated, those people are putting the rest of the community in grave danger. All it takes is ten percent of a community to not vaccinate and the tipping point has been reached; we will see disease and epidemic spread at an alarming rate. I belong to a homeschool group where many of our members homeschool specifically so they don’t have to vaccinate. I’m quite sure we in our group have far surpassed the tipping point.
What hubris it must take to believe yourself intellectually superior to doctors, scientists, and people who have dedicate their lives to eradicating fatal diseases, to saving children, including your own.
What hubris to wield that kind of power, the power to hurt, maim, or kill my infant with your own infected child. All with a condescending shrug of your shoulders. Because you know better.
And then I’m told by some, seemingly reasonable people, that I will never change minds because I am too emotional, too passionate, too divisive. I’m on my soapbox.
Yes. I am. And I just can’t get down. You could kill my child because you’re afraid of…. What? Autism? That paper has been long debunked. Mercury? It’s not that kind of mercury. Research that one a little bit more. Some long term effect that we don’t know about yet?
How about death? That is a short term, immediate effect that actually has happened, that we do in fact, in science, know about. The science on this is settled. And I just don’t see how we can possibly move forward as a country, an American community, if we can’t trust the science that is settled.
Plato believed that we should have leaders called “philosopher kings.” Not war generals, not lawyers, certainly not businessmen. Philosopher kings would be the wisest among us, the elders of our community if you will. And why not? We have had very few great thinkers lead us in our country, but when we have, consider any great thinker you wish, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, the other Roosevelt, and yes, Barack Obama, they have led us in a forward facing, positive direction. They all have their flaws, some of them horrible flaws (I’m looking at you Jefferson), but they genuinely believed that they were governing as best they could for the greatest amount of people they could within the constraints of the power with which they had been entrusted. Also, they trusted science, reason, logic.
We are so far from that place, from pride in a great thinker as our leader, at this point in time. Donald Trump is a staunch, confessed, anti-intellectual. He absolutely promotes a drive of every man for himself. The will to set out on our own, to make our own way, to take care of mine and mine only and forget everyone else is strong right now. But we must resist it, if for nothing else, then for the sake of our children.
Yes. I hate vaccines. I lay with my baby’s warm body pressed against me last night, pressing my lips against her temple every time I roused from my own restless sleep, feeling her feverish forehead and her warm breath on my skin. And I thought: I hate vaccines!
But I imagined what mothers must have felt like holding their babies sick with polio, with measles, with rubella, with diphtheria. Unsure if their babies would make it through the night. There was a time when parents didn’t name their children for the first year of life because the infant mortality rate was so high. We’ve come so far from that, largely thanks to vaccines. I’ll take one or two nights of a low grade fever every couple months any day.
Yes. In the moment, I hate vaccines.
But I hate the idea of my child dying senselessly even more.