Vaccination exemption in CA, personal down, medical up

[Rev. Rye]

I would plan to vaccinate my kids, but I feel like if someone doesn't want to for whatever reason they shouldn't be forced into it .

This would be an admirable stance if not for the fact that we're talking about keeping kids from carrying debilitating and (in quite a few cases) potentially deadly illnesses that are a Hell of a lot easier to prevent than treat. And add to it that parents who don't vaccinate tend to be clustered together and herd immunity can become virtually nonexistent in such cases, that stance becomes a Hell of a lot less defensible.

Remember how, a couple years ago, one kid started a massive outbreak of measles in Disneyland and wound up infecting over a hundred people? Most of the people who got it weren't vaccinated because their parents said no.

I mean, I can understand why people might want to refuse vaccines: every time I've been given the flu vaccine, I end up getting it anyway (I don't know, maybe the mutations not covered by a given vaccine are attracted to those who've been given it somehow). As a kid, I hated getting shots (to this day, I'm scared of doctors and needles; though, after a severe stomach ailment a couple years ago, I wound up getting a bit desensitized), not helped by the fact my grade school days were so horrible that the prospect of being crippled by polio or even dying of a preventable disease seemed like a step up from what I had to go through every day.

But, really, at least for the vaccines that take care of the worse diseases, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks (and it certainly won't give your kids autism, no matter what Jenny McCarthy says; and, as someone on the spectrum, the implication that autism is in itself somehow so horrible that BRINGING BACK POLIO might be a decent alternative to it offends me to no end.)