We actually had a really good discussion with one of our doctors about this (our internist, not our pediatrician). He had three children, and we wanted to know what he thought about vaccinating (or not).

One of his observations was that today, it is fairly safe not to vaccinate your child, as some of the true scourges, like smallpox and polio, have been largely eradicated, and your (unvaccinated) children will benefit from the vaccinated children’s immunity, which prevents the disease from roaming the community. However, as has been seen with whooping cough in several states, and just recently mumps in several others, these diseases can and do come back naturally, and of course today there is also the prospect of bioterrorism bringing one of these back suddenly and in a big way. While whooping cough is, perhaps, acceptable in terms of risk, what about polio or smallpox? The more kids who do not get vaccinated, the larger the risk of these diseases getting an opportunity to come back. Or tetanus, which is very much here and with us today, lurking in the dirt where children love to play (and get cut)?

I guess one of the questions is whether one is in the anti-vaccine camp, or the anti-thimerosal camp? Certainly I am in the latter, and have no plans to inject our child with thimerosal at any age. But currently we are planning to begin vaccinating him (with non-thimerosal vaccines) when he is 2, before he starts to be around lots of other children. We haven’t decided which vaccines to have at this point. Certainly, we plan on smallpox, polio, and “D-P-T,” but I’m much more troubled by the decision on, say, hepatitis-B or chickenpox. Or meningitis, or who knows what else by the time he’s two.

If one is in the “anti-vaccination” camp, regardless of whether thimerosal is included or not, it seems a dicier situation, as eventually a large, unvaccinated population will allow one or more of the “eradicated” diseases to make a comeback.

I’m the person Tom Chappell mentioned that refuses to vaccinate my kids, but my wife Naomi really is the one that did the research. I probably would have gone ahead and done it with no knowledge of the dangers with vaccination. People see it as having no risk whatsoever, and it’s a direct result of the cover-up from the drug companies and the CDC. The CDC knows that if they said thimerosal is unsafe, people would think all vaccines are unsafe, and they didn’t want that. (Even though they banned thimerosal for cows 10 years ago).

Adding a vaccine to the list that kids get is a guaranteed $200 million a year in profit, and so in the 90’s the government added a lot of vaccines, but never looked at the cumulative amount of mercury the babies were receiving. It turned out to be a lot of mercury, autism shot up, and the cover-up began.

We had always felt that if our kids do get sick with something a vaccine could have prevented, it won’t be a big deal, they’ll get better and be none the worse for it. When Amelie was one year old, she got whooping cough, and she coughed a little bit for three weeks and that was that. We’re not that concerned with this.

One question we get a lot is people asking if they’ll be allowed in school. Yes, schools are required by-law to accept your kids whether they’ve been vaccinated or not.