By: Amanda King
Kristen O’Meara is a special needs teacher and mother of three.
She was also a strict anti-vaccinator, commonly known as an anti-vaxxer, and thus elected not to vaccinate her children. Her conviction in the righteousness of refusing innoculation, however, was shaken when all of her children were infected with rotavirus.
Rotavirus is an extremely contagious stomach virus that can lead to severe dehydration, hospitalization, and even death. It is also easily preventable through its vaccine.
Soon enough, her husband and O’Meara herself were infected as well. So after her entire family was threatened by this deadly disease, O’Meara resolved to do a more thorough investigation into the foundations of the anti-vaccination movement.
What she found was a complete and total lack of scientific evidence.
Thankfully, everyone in Kristen O’Meara’s family survived; however, this is only one of many such cases which highlights what can happen when children are not vaccinated.
Today, many parents knowingly put their children’s lives at risk by refusing precautionary vaccinations. They do this on the unfounded basis that vaccines cause more overall harm than good.
When parents choose not to vaccinate their children, they are not just making a decision for their child, but for every child with whom their child comes in contact with and thus taking away the very right that anti-vaxxers argue for.
The biggest component of the anti-vaccine movement is the belief that vaccines cause serious disorders – chiefly autism – and yet there is an overwhelming amount of scientific data disproving this theory. Even the original study had to be retracted due to falsified data.
The initial tests took place in 1988 when Andrew Wakefield and his partners published a study hypothesizing a link between the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.
Since then, it has been refuted by numerous specialists as it did not meet the rigorous standards of legitimate scientific experimentation. Moreover, when experts attempted to repeat the study correctly, they found no connection between vaccinations and autism.
Wakefield himself continues to refuse every request to redo his experiment and prove his results. Still, this one, fraudulent study is disgustingly used as a selling point for the anti-vaxxer bandwagon to draw in those individuals too ignorant and oblivious to conduct their own research.
Put simply, there is no proof that autism or any other serious developmental harm is a side-effect of getting vaccinated.
Even if there was a chance — which there literally isn’t — would parents prefer either the slight possibility that their children might develop autism or the significant likelihood that they could die?
While it is possible for unvaccinated children to go years or even a lifetime without incident, things can go downhill fast if they encounter a carrier, another unvaccinated child, or especially the disease, itself.
And while under-vaccinated communities are rare in the United States, they are remarkably common in other parts of the world.
Another argument that anti-vaxxer parents make is that even if their child does get sick, living through the sickness on their own will strengthen their natural immunity. A sensible idea, given the common knowledge that once you’ve had certain viruses you cannot contract them again. But that is the very definition of what vaccines do.
Vaccines build immunity by giving you small doses of a virus so that you develop immunity without the danger of becoming fatally sick. Moreover, there is no evidence that a person could die as a side effect of vaccinations, while there are centuries of proof that a person will die without them.
I agree parents have the right to make decisions affecting their own kids and if it were a matter of whether or not a child is allowed to eat sugary cereal there would be no issue.
But a parent who chooses not to vaccinate their child takes that same right away from other parents.
The fact that an anti-vaccination movement exists at all is terrifying in its implication that people only seek out “evidence” supporting what they want to believe, rather than the truth. Otherwise, the anti-vaxxer community would realize that all of their claims are grossly unfounded and refusing inoculation is dangerous for everyone.