Abstaining from Vaccination should NOT be a right

[Autumnlicious]

I immunize my children for everything except Influenza. That vaccination is just plain silly.

You are gravely misinformed, willfully ignorant, or plain stupid.

Influenza is not something to be ignored. I could list several flu pandemics, but part of me thinks you're too deluded to change your stupid beliefs despite the risks you are exposing your children to. Influenza is quite mutable and has similar tendencies to the common cold in hybridizing with other flues.

However, vaccines are still effective if the flu one catches has a root or parent that the vaccine was derived from.

To put it simply, the influenza vaccine knocks out a whole subfamily of influenza that the CDC determines as 'most common'. By extension, you are able to better fight off an influenza infection despite being in different cities, states, etc,.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2N2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu

A lot of people do not recognize that some vaccinations are live viruses and you are actually injecting yourself with a virus that your body has to fight off. Our bodies develop antibodies to it off...and if we are successful in the fight we are now immune. Hence, why if you have had the chicken pox you do not need to be vaccinated.

You're indulging in a form of naturalistic fallacy, that our bodies will "take care of themselves" in creating antibodies.

I'd like to point out that people who caught polio either "develop antibodies to it off", after all polio has a 95% rate of doing nothing to infected patients.

The other 5% isn't so lucky -- here's a lucky one:



Also, "live viruses" in a vaccine are "attenuated" viruses. In other words, purposefully weakened and damaged viruses that posses the same signature as the harsh, nasty, virulent forms.

Furthermore, you can request a killed virues vaccine, which is mostly just virus parts to train your immune system to recognize. It doesn't imprint the signature of the virus into your immune systems memory (like an attenuated one would) because it's just a bunch of proteins instead of the whole virus capsid.

In other words, you're wrong.