Vaccines

I’m sure that there are a lot of pro-vaccine people out there breathing a sigh of relief right now. Finally it has been proven that the Autism link and the MMR shot was pure bullshit.

As a new Dad, I’ve heard a lot about vaccinations and the risks. There are a lot of people touting that the shots are unsafe. And that their child “changed” after getting the shots. You’ll here some very passionate speeches from both the sides of the argument and quite honestly, I’m not really one to get in on either side. What you decide to do for your child is your choice.

I actually fall into the middle of this debate. Not that I’m against vaccines or that I think that there is a risk. I think that vaccines are a good thing. Sure there are some risks, but they’re minimal for the most part. Can they be devastating if your child happens to be that 1 in a million or 10 million, absolutely. But its a risk that I’m willing to take. Its the same risk I take when walking outside in a thunderstorm. I could get hit by lightning.

In our birthing class that my wife and I took, we were introduced to the Dr Sears book, “The Vaccine Book”. I’m betting you can guess what its about.

In the book, you will learn about the pros and cons of all the vaccines, alternative shot schedules, basically, EVERYTHING you could ever want to know about the shots. I highly recommend being as informed as possible as a parent. I also highly recommend whiskey as a form of relaxation so you don’t get too paranoid about everything. Kids are made of rubber, they’ll survive, we did.

My wife and I chose to go with an alternative schedule for our vaccines and possibly skipping the chicken pox shot. There’s something about having a vaccine for that one that seems silly to me. Maybe its because I didn’t have a bad case of it as a child.

Ok hippie, why are you doing this to your child?

Now, I didn’t say we were skipping major shots here. We may be skipping one shot, we may not. All the others, including the MMR shot that everyone was so incorrectly freaked out about we will be giving. We will just be spreading them out more and splitting up a few things across a longer timeframe.

Why do you need to do this, the study was bullshit? Simple, I’m an engineer.

If I can reduce the number of variables, I can better pinpoint if there is a problem what it was so we can find a work around. Its pretty simple really. If I can take your shot that has 5 different vaccines in it and say get 2 one visit and then the other 3 the next, I have a better shot of figuring out that yes my son reacted and then what he reacted too. I know that this will be a bad comparison, but when our dog got a round of shots early in life and there were 4 given at one time, I only knew what she reacted to by the large lump on the one side of her body. Our vet had cautiously mapped out where each shot went so we knew if there was a reaction, what it was. If they had given all shots in the same location, we would have been screwed.

Engineer == Asshole

Now, because I’m doing an alternative schedule, I sometimes get a questioning look from doctors. Here’s my example. We had a VERY lethargic child on our hands and our doctor freaked us out a little by telling us, well, if he is still lethargic in a few hours and you can’t seem to get him going, take him to the ER. Well, guess what happened. To the ER we go. During our visit, we let the ER doctor know about our Dr Sears alternative schedule we were on. He stated to us, “If I had written that book, I would have been run out of the medical community”.

Great, now I’m an asshole.

My wife calmly explained to him that we weren’t skipping shots, we were simply trying to spread things out. My body, as others, doesn’t like a ton of meds running through it and if we were to have a reaction, we’d like to narrow it down to what it was so we can watch it more closely in the future. He’ll still be getting all his shots as you can see.

I wanted to simply punch the guy repeatedly about the head and shoulders.

Luckily, he came around quickly when he realized that we had solid informed reasoning for why we were doing what we were doing.

Let me be perfectly clear here….the Dr Sears book is about education. It is there to inform you about the risks and benefits for each and every shot. IT IS NOT an anti-vaccine book. If anything, it is pro-vaccine, but also pro-education. If there is something that you may not agree with, now you have some knowledge on your side that is better than blindly going in and having meds injected into your son or daughters body.

Conclusion

Do what you think it best for your child, but do it in an educated manner. Look at the facts behind the studies. If someone has created a study with results that no one else can reproduce, there’s probably a reason. Something is goofy about the study.