responses to popular anti-vaxer rhetoric
I made a generic copy/paste that you can all use against antivaxers:
1. The likelihood of ANY “vaccine injury” has less than a 0.01% chance of happening. (Which includes mild reactions)
2. Those scary toxins in the vaccines go through chemical reactions that make them harmless to the body and easy to metabolize. Think about it this way, sodium and chloride on their own will kill you but together you get table salt.
3. The increase in unhealthy children with diabetes, asthma, allergies, cancer, etc. Is far more likely caused by processed foods, chemical cleaners, pollution, sedentary life in front of screens and the age at which the mother gives birth than vaccines.
4. Your vaccines do not have aborted fetal cells in them. In the 60s some vaccines were created using voluntarily aborted fetal cells, but scientists were able to grow the tissue in the lab, so you are about 3 generations removed from that original vaccine.
5. If herd immunity weakens, and dead diseases make a comeback, they have the opportunity to mutate and evolve making current treatment and prevention methods obsolete, so even if you aren’t willing to “light your child on fire to protect another” who is immunocompromised, remember that.
6. Every medication has risk, as a mother you most likely have used birth control even though is doubles and almost triples your risk of stroke and blood clots. Even aspirin has the possible side effect for blindness and kidney failure.
7. The long term side effects of these diseases are far more likely and much worse than vaccines. Once you have the measles, for example, you are at risk for SSPE, a fatal disease that attacks your nervous system.
8. Stop spreading fear and misinformation, you are far more of a risk than any vaccine.
9. There is less than 0.00001% chance that your child will develop encephalitis from the vaccine compared to 1-3 in 1,000 children contracting measles will develop encephalitis concurrent with the measles infection. 10–15% of those children will die and a further 25% will be left with permanent neurological damage. 1 in 1,000 children with measles will develop post-infectious encephalitis, which has a very high fatality rate. >1-10,000 children develop SSPE, which is 100% fatal in almost all cases (the exception being a single child that survived) When it comes to measles vs. the vaccine, it’s no contest.
•As many as one out of every 20 children with measles gets pneumonia, the most common cause of death from measles in young children.
•About one child out of every 1,000 who get measles will develop encephalitis (swelling of the brain) that can lead to convulsions and can leave the child deaf or with intellectual disability.
•For every 1,000 children who get measles, one or two will die from it.
•Measles may cause pregnant woman to give birth prematurely, or have a low-birth-weight baby.
•Ear infections occur in about one out of every 10 children with measles and can result in permanent hearing loss.
•Diarrhea is reported in less than one out of 10 people with measles. Which can lead to dehydration and secondary complications.
•Measles is also responsible for inhibiting immune responses which leaves the sick individual vulnerable to secondary infections.
10. And even if the infection doesn’t kill you, the morbidity complications from measles are life altering. Some people may suffer from severe complications, such as pneumonia (infection of the lungs) and encephalitis (swelling of the brain). They may need to be hospitalized and could die.
11. It’s not about YOU and “your freedoms”… It’s about everyone else. Stop seeing this as the government trying to regulate your lives. It’s the government enacting a law that protects people. I’ve written to several law makers about this subject and they thankfully agreed that we should have mandatory vaccine requirements to protect the general population. You don’t complain about DUI laws… this really is no different.
12. Since 1988 only 20,522 petitions for vaccine injury compensation have been filed. Of those, only 6,465 were deemed credible and paid out. While the dollar amount was high, the number of cases is much more compelling. Are you going to stop using aspirin for your children because one girl had a terrible, awful reaction where she lost most of her skin and was awarded $63 million? No because it was a very rare reaction. No drug is one size fits all. Unfortunately, some will have adverse reaction but I’ll take the odds of less than 7k vaccine injuries over the last 20 years versus contracting any of these diseases.
