I got interested in the topic of vaccines way back in medical school. A friend of mine convinced me to read a book about vaccines, and it ended up being a very anti-vaccine book. It was all about an old vaccine called the DTP vaccine that we don’t use anymore. But the book talked a lot about the risks and the dangers of that vaccine. The author of that book was calling for that vaccine to no longer be used.
A number of years later, it turns out that they did discover that vaccine was causing a lot of very severe, life-threatening, even fatal side effects, so they did end up taking that vaccine off the market.
So it kind of opened my eyes to the fact that there are some very severe, fortunately very rare, side effects to vaccines, and I wanted to learn more about this issue. I started reading a lot more books.
And unfortunately, when you look at vaccine books on the market, you’ll see they’re for the most part very anti-vaccine. They only tell all the dangers and risks of vaccines, only that side of the story. I found there were no books out there that gave both sides of the story: the risks of vaccines versus the risks of the diseases. So that’s what I set out to write about, was something that gave both sides of the issue so that parents can read something that helps them make an
informed, educated decision.
How were your patients’ attitudes toward vaccines changing?
The biggest fear I think every parent has about vaccines is that they don’t want their child to be one of those
very rare statistics in which their child suffers a very severe vaccine reaction. … Something like 1 in 100,000 babies has a very severe reaction.
But it’s very scary for a parent to think that they could be one of those, so that just causes parents to raise questions.
Exactly how safe are vaccines, and how likely is it that my baby’s going to have a severe reaction? Parents want to know those kinds of numbers so that they can feel that they’re making a more educated decision about vaccines.
I see a growing problem in America, in which more and more parents are choosing not to vaccinate. There’s a growing distrust about the safety of vaccines, so I wanted to put something together that parents can read, that gave them a fair look and an educated look about vaccines
so they could understand what the possible reactions are. Fortunately they’re very rare. But parents also need to understand what the risks of the diseases is so that parents can weigh both sides of the story so they’re understanding what’s going on and they can make a decision for their child.
With the growing mistrust of vaccinations in our country, more and more parents are saying no to vaccines. They’re refusing all vaccines altogether. And I think if more and more parents keep making those decisions, we’re going to run into a lot of trouble with these diseases. Illnesses that are very rare right now, that most parents don’t have to fear, could escalate and could start killing babies left and right if fewer and fewer parents are vaccinating.
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