Vaccines

So, I was sick this weekend. Not unexpectedly. My sickness was the result of a vaccine I had taken on Friday. The literature on the vaccine said 1 in 6 people will have a reaction strong enough to miss work. I guess I am number six. Yay. My reaction, while uncomfortable, was not all that serious. Like the literature said, I had fever, chills and muscle aches for a day. If I had to do it again, I would. The reward outweighs the risk. If I were to get the illness that this vaccine protects me from, I would miss a lot more than one day of work. So this is not an antivaxer blog. This is a provaxer blog.

Antivaxers are people who do not believe in vaccines, who think they will give people autism, or are a government conspiracy, or who just generally don’t like putting foreign substances in their bodies. Antivaxers span the political spectrum. Antivaxers can be found among conservatives, liberals, Greens, and Libertarians. How unifying!

There are risks to getting a vaccine as there are risks for any medical procedure. Most parents would not hesitate to rush their child to the hospital for an operation if that child had a ruptured appendix. The odds of that child dying from an appendectomy is much higher than the chance of anything bad happening from a vaccine. Yet you would do it because the alternative is certain death.

Antivaxers have been around as long as vaccines have. Edward Jenner discovered that people who got cow pox seemed immune from small pox. He developed the small pox vaccine in 1798 from the cow pox organism. The word vaccine comes from “vacca” which means cow in Latin. Early antivaxers soon emerged against the new small pox vaccine saying it would turn people into cows. But the antivaxer craze really took off when a doctor published a bogus study saying a particular vaccine led to a greater risk of autism. The study itself only followed 12 children (a pathetic amount to draw any kind of inference from). Even so, it caused a stir and other researchers began studying the possibility. Study after study found no link between the vaccine and autism. Other problems with that original study caused the journal that published it to retract it.

If a parent’s child is vaccinated and eventually is diagnosed with autism. They are going to believe there is a link. They heard it, they’ve seen it, ergo it has to be so. You won’t be able to argue with that parent. Don’t even try. It is emotional. But the fact is there is no scientific evidence of a link. A lot of kids are diagnosed with autism. Most of those will have been vaccinated, because most kids are vaccinated. But whether they were vaccinated or not the same number of kids would get autism. That is what the science shows. There is no room for emotion in science. The facts are the facts. Just because Aunt Betty tells you not to do a certain procedure because she heard it makes your nose fall off . . .   that is not a reasonable basis to make medical decisions. If you have concerns, you should get the facts, the real facts. If you are getting your facts from social media, that’s a problem.

There is a reason why your great grandmother had 14 kids.  Most of them died young. Most of those that died, would not have died had they lived in the modern age of science and medicine. A lot of those deaths could have been prevented by vaccines that would have prevented most of the epidemics that killed people by the bucketful.

Scientists are sometimes wrong, and each human body is different (which is why people react differently to the same treatment). But when something has been tested and retested and retested, the odds that something bad is going to happen to you are extremely low.

So I suffered through my little bit of chills and fever and I am fine now. Does it mean that it is now impossible for me to get the disease for which I was vaccinated? No. There is still a risk, although it is a much smaller one now. Like I said, I would do it again. Weigh the odds. Do the math. Or (here’s an idea) just ask your doctor.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, Amazon, or the other usual online sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out soon).

Link to Star Liner