Need good argument for why vaccinations are a good thing.

[mesa]

I love my little girl and so does her mom but she needs to understand.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I love my little girl and so does her mom but she needs to understand.

Because they prevent people from contracting deadly diseases? That isn't good enough? I assume this mom has been influenced by the misconception that vaccines are dangerous?

Read up on some misconceptions from the CDC here
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/6mishome.htm

How to vaccines work
http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/vaccines/understanding/pages/howwork.aspx

General info
http://www.vaccines.gov/who_and_when/

 

[mesa]

Because they prevent people from contracting deadly diseases? That isn't good enough?

Unfortunately not.

I assume this mom has been influenced by the misconception that vaccines are dangerous?

I agree and have tried all of your suggestions but apparently it is a cultural thing. I believe my best chances are through grandma.

On a side note, for those of you considering some adventure; what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas unless a ring pops up the next morning.

 

[Drakkith]

Show her this list of the diseases that are easily prevented by getting vaccinated. Many of them were epidemics in the age before vaccines. Ask her if she's ever seen anyone with a serious viral illness. My guess is probably not. Why? Because of vaccination.

Also, explain that by not vaccinated her child she is endangering not only the health of her daughter, but countless others that are immunocompromised, such as those with HIV, cancer, and those who've had transplants and require immunosuppressants in order to avoid rejection of the transplanted organ.

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/

Anthrax
Cervical Cancer
Diphtheria
Hepatitis A
Hepatitis B
Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib)
Human Papillomavirus (HPV)
H1N1 Flu (Swine Flu)
Influenza (Seasonal Flu)
Japanese Encephalitis (JE) Lyme Disease
Measles
Meningococcal
Monkeypox
Mumps
Pertussis (Whooping Cough)
Pneumococcal
Poliomyelitis (Polio)
Rabies Rotavirus
Rubella (German Measles)
Shingles (Herpes Zoster)
Smallpox
Tetanus (Lockjaw)
Tuberculosis
Typhoid Fever
Varicella (Chickenpox)
Yellow Fever

 

[Vanadium 50]

Picking one disease (polio) at random:
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/images/polio_fig_02.jpg

Looking at infant mortality in general:

There are risks with vaccinations. There are orders of magnitude bigger risks with smallpox, polio, tuberculosis, etc...

 

[thorium1010]

Or what happens recently a year back, when you start hearing to misinformation that "vaccines are no longer safe "

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-05-measles-surges-uk-years-vaccine.html

 

[mesa]

Show her this list of the diseases that are easily prevented by getting vaccinated. Many of them were epidemics in the age before vaccines. Ask her if she's ever seen anyone with a serious viral illness. My guess is probably not. Why? Because of vaccination.

Also, explain that by not vaccinated her child she is endangering not only the health of her daughter, but countless others that are immunocompromised, such as those with HIV, cancer, and those who've had transplants and require immunosuppressants in order to avoid rejection of the transplanted organ.

Excellent point and one I have not thought of yet.

Picking one disease (polio) at random:

There are risks with vaccinations. There are orders of magnitude bigger risks with smallpox, polio, tuberculosis, etc...

That is interesting, polio was the example I gave her although I didn't have such nice charts.

Or what happens recently a year back, when you start hearing to misinformation that "vaccines are no longer safe "

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-05-measles-surges-uk-years-vaccine.html

Good article and goes to the heart of what is happening. It reminds me of the time I took her into speak with our daughters Pediatrician and she happened to have spent much time in the hospital working with children that are now contracting these diseases due to non-immunization.

I asked her (the ex) if she had any questions and said she wanted until the end of the year to look more deeply into this. We all know 'January 1' just passed but instead of anything 'evidence based' or even slightly grounded in reality she has resorted to accusing the Doctor of not being who she says she is...

This is bad.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

Similar to thorium1010's link, but with cases in the USA:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/12/06/measles_2013_us_cases_triple.html

Perhaps this is just natural selection at work.

 

[mesa]

Perhaps this is just natural selection at work.

I prefer preventable 'selection' to stay away from my daughter.

 

[Student100]

Of all the crazy vaccines they injected me with during my time in the service; the only two that ever caused any complications were smallpox and anthrax. Those complications were mild, a scar on my right shoulder from the smallpox and acute joint pain from anthrax. The vaccines I got as a child I remember hurting because I was scared of needles back then but I don’t actually remember any adverse effects.

It’s well worth dealing with the minor complications than the actual disease. Most likely your daughter will never have to get either smallpox (due to a very successful vaccination program) or anthrax (which I think they only do in the DoD currently). Ask your wife why she is concerned with attenuated, dead, or pieces of pathogens being injected into your daughter versus the live organisms she might pick up that cause disease.

I’d just smuggle your daughter off to the doctor yourself if your wife (or ex-wife?) refuses to listen to reason. I don't know if this is actually doable though (whether they need the moms consent or not.) Really, all that she is doing is granting these pathogens a host to continue to propagate and extending the generations that need vaccines to prevent disease.

 

[Evo]

Worse case, she's putting your daughter's life/health at risk by not allowing her to be vaccinated.

 

[mheslep]

If current events are more convincing, the UK has been running an unintended demonstration on the subject. Thanks to scare from a fraudulent publication by the now former Dr Andrew Wakefield in 1998, vaccination rates dropped down to near 50% in parts of the UK. Consequently the incident rate of measles, usually a couple dozen/year, jumped to over 2000.

More than a decade ago, British parents refused to give measles shots to at least a million children because of now discredited research that linked the vaccine to autism. Now, health officials are scrambling to catch up and stop a growing epidemic of the contagious disease.

This year, the U.K. has had more than 1,200 cases of measles, after a record number of nearly 2,000 cases last year. The country once recorded only several dozen cases every year. It now ranks second in Europe, behind only Romania

According to the CDC, this completely preventable affair will likely kill up to 4 children.

For every 1,000 children who get measles, one or two will die.

If passing on knowledge of the above is ineffective, maybe passing along some photos of children with measles is warranted.

 

[AlephZero]

I am entirely in favor of vaccination, but playing devil's advocate, measles is probably not the best example. When I was growing up in the UK, it was more or less "standard" for kids to catch measles/mumps/chicken pox at school, and provided it happened well before puberty the long term effects were negligible. FWIW I had two out of the three, and I don't remember any childhood deaths from them.

But once you start to reduce the incidence of those diseases in the population, people catch them later in life, when they can be much more serious, especially if you get the disease when you are pregnant.

According to the CDC, this completely preventable affair will likely kill up to 4 children.

Actually, after 1219 cases in the 8-month "epidemic" in Wales, there were no deaths of children - but there was one epidemic-related death of a 25 year old male, from pneumonia. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-23168519

 

[iwant2beoz]

I whole heartedly agree that vaccination is a good thing, with one side note. My son only got the vaccines that he really needed at birth, the rest he is getting at a somewhat slower pace then what is normally done partly to decrease the risk of any reactions but also so that the blood brain barrier could filter out more of the less then pleasant preservatives used to store vaccines. But by 3 your daughter should be fine.

 

[Number Nine]

so that the blood brain barrier could filter out more of the less then pleasant preservatives used to store vaccines

You're administering them more slowly so that the BBB can "filter out" the preservatives? This is just as much nonsense as the OP's wife. There is no evidence to suggest that the current vaccine schedule is "too much, too soon", and the BBB doesn't work that way.

 

[iwant2beoz]

You're administering them more slowly so that the BBB can "filter out" the preservatives? This is just as much nonsense as the OP's wife. There is no evidence to suggest that the current vaccine schedule is "too much, too soon", and the BBB doesn't work that way.

The research on wether the bbb is fully developed at birth is some what vague, although most scientists believe that it is I prefer to be cautious. I am only being careful, some ingredients in vaccines are toxic http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/VaccineSafety/UCM096228 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vaccine_ingredients . That said I am getting him vaccinated just not all at once. Also that is how the bbb works http://nba.uth.tmc.edu/neuroscience/m/s4/chapter11.html

 

[strangerep]

I asked her (the ex) if she had any questions and said she wanted until the end of the year to look more deeply into this. We all know 'January 1' just passed but instead of anything 'evidence based' or even slightly grounded in reality she has resorted to accusing the Doctor of not being who she says she is...

This is bad.

Sorry to say this, but I suspect it is worse than bad: it is indicative of a lurking mental illness: Delusional thinking.

You mentioned "cultural" aspects. Are there any religious or spiritual aspects in all this? E.g., does the mother want to "pray" or "meditate" upon it, or "seek guidance" from [...unspecified...] ?

You have some tough decisions to make, to safeguard your child.

A delusion is a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary.
[...]
Delusions typically occur in the context of neurological or mental illness, although they are not tied to any particular disease and have been found to occur in the context of many pathological states (both physical and mental).
[...]
Cultural factors have "a decisive influence in shaping delusions". For example, delusions of guilt and punishment are frequent in a Western, Christian country like Austria, but not in Pakistan - where it is more likely persecution.

A mentally ill mother may indeed love her child, but if she ignores well-founded evidence in favor of delusional thinking, then child protection authorities must get involved.

 

[Cephas Atheos]

In the many, many, many discussions I've had with serious anti-vaxxers, it boils down in every single case to someone's mother being unvaccinated and their exposure to the Wakefield propagandists, combined with a selfish desire to exercise control the child. In many cases, there's also an immense desire to go against any authority figures.

I'm sorry to state it as baldly as that, but it's been my experience, with around thirty or so people, both face-to-face and online. Only one protagonist was male.

There are at least two significant issues with trying to address their concerns. First, the number of hoax or ignorant videos and websites pushing the anti-vax agenda outnumbers genuinely helpful sites 10 or 15 to 1. Any pro-vax YouTube video will also have at least a dozen anti-vax videos advertised.

Secondly, the honestly of our spokespeople works against the almost non-existent medical comprehension of all anti-vax parents. Any words like 'rarely', 'safe', 'unlikely', 'almost', and other weasel words are seized on and used as escape clauses. Since we can't ethically just say '100% safe', we need to educate the parents individually. We need great analogies that make sense to them, not statistics! Trust me - most of these parents understand statistics less than medicine, and they don't understand that at all, for the most part.

I've actually seen a vaccine described as (and I quote) : bits of aborted fetus, soaking in mercury, and corrupted with preservatives. No, I'm not kidding.

Even the herd immunity argument works against us - they hear the word "herd" and think you're INSULTING them! That could do with some marketing speak!

And unfortunately, a very seriously deluded woman is currently suing her husband for vaccinating their children behind her back! It won't get past the first hearing with any luck. But I've already seen the anti-vax propaganda machine telling people that, if the hearing rejects the suit, it's because the judge is controlled by 'big pharma'!

There's a huge industry dedicated to stopping all vaccinations, but I don't understand how they benefit from their stupidity. It has to be money... the only thing I can think of is that there's a corporation funding them, in an effort to get the government to privatise the vaccine industry, and then dig into the lucrative market once people start getting more scared of the disease outbreaks than they are of vaccinations. Crazy, I know.

I'm sorry this doesn't help the OP, but maybe it might be food for thought...

 

[strangerep]

[...] And unfortunately, a very seriously deluded woman is currently suing her husband for vaccinating their children behind her back! It won't get past the first hearing with any luck.

Sounds like the loonies are mounting a takeover of the asylum.

Please let us know the outcome.

 

[Evo]

A large part of the problem is this crackpot *celebrity* Jenny McCarthy, which for some unknown reason was recently added to the popular daytime talk show The View with Barbara Walters.

Those watching Jenny McCarthy's debut on ABC's "The View" this morning should keep in mind one thing: She's not qualified in the least to give you advice on vaccinating your children.

McCarthy, the model and TV personality who moonlights as the anti-vaccine movement's most influential (read: dangerous) voice, sells plenty of books, speaks passionately about parenting and cracks off-color jokes. She also peddles the discredited, poisonous claims that the way we vaccinate our children against the diseases that were once regular killers of children places our young ones at greater risk of developing autism -- the kind of conspiracy theorizing that will draw only more eyeballs.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/09/news/la-ol-jenny-mccarthy-abc-view-vaccines-20130909

Absolutely disgusting that such a dangerous crackpot should be given validity and an audience of millions to perpetuate such dangerous misinformation.

 

[adalinaabella]

Within one year of birth their are various vaccination which is important.So, being a parent we should try to do all the essential works for the baby.

 

[Drakkith]

Within one year of birth their are various vaccination which is important.So, being a parent we should try to do all the essential works for the baby.

If there was a Like button on PF I'd click it a million times for this post.

 

[SteamKing]

This article in Slate gives a good account of someone who grew up in an anti-vaccine household before it was all the rage:

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/...ifestyle_couldn_t_prevent_many_childhood.html

Not surprisingly, this woman contracted some potentially nasty diseases, including viral meningitis and whooping cough, in her childhood which are no walk in the park and remain potentially fatal if not recognized and treated in a timely manner. These diseases plagued (no, I don't think she caught the plague, but not from lack of trying) the author not only through her childhood, but also into her young adulthood. This woman was fortunate, but some of her friends were not so lucky.

 

[Dian Cecht]

I would say:

The decision to use any drug or vaccine involves a cost-benefit analysis. In most cases with vaccines the benefits far outweigh the costs. But: you don't want to stick yourself or your kid with every vaccine ever made as quickly as possible. You want to space them out, and some you will never need. Which to take and when? In general, it makes sense to follow the advice of your doctor, who, after all, is far more knowledgeable than you on these matters.

 

[Borek]

Show her these pictures: http://io9.com/the-strangest-tradition-of-the-victorian-era-post-mort-472772709

These are prevaccination era kids. Their deaths were so frequent there was whole photographic industry built around them.

 

[Monstrous Math]

I live in California and ten families killed their children last year by not vaccinating them against whooping cough:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/01/anti-vaccine-parents-caused-californias-lethal-whooping-cough-epidemic/

About 9,000 kids got the disease (with more to come) and it will possibly damage their development.

If you want a powerful argument, I suggest you contact one of the people who lost their child and ask them if it was a good freaking idea to not vaccinate.

If you are worried that a vaccine will affect your kid's development, realize that the disease is much worse.