Don’t need to go back 100 years. You can see the scarring on people who had adverse reaction to the smallpox vaccine today.

Diphtheria? Polio? Tetanus? Hello? Tap. Tap.

BTW, just because your grandparents or even parents survived some disease doesn’t mean at all that you’re gonna survive it. Geez. And have you asked your grandparents (or in my case, parents) how many kids they knew who died or were placed in iron lungs because of polio? My mother knew several who would be in school one day and dead or hospitalized the next. Guess they weren’t as lucky as your predecessors. Or how many kids they knew who died of diphtheria? Whooping cough? Hey, I know…let’s go back 100 years and check out the rates of death from smallpox, not to mention the horrific scarring for the survivors. Bring it on, right?

How many children are abused (physically, emotionally, psychologically) or killed because they are autistic? You can’t vaccinate against that.

One analysis I read in the MMWR noted that the accuracy of the reporting to VAERS is not checked, as is the case for a filing with the VCIP, and that multiple reports for the same event can end up being voluntarily filed if parent, doctor, and public health department file.

With each of her vaccines, she’d experience the same symptoms as described above, with fever, dehydration, head to toe rash, vomiting and more. I thought it was the vaccines and no one would listen to me. Knowing now, that it was likely just aggravating an underlying, undiagnosed condition leaves me conflicted about how I feel about vaccines.

I would never want to purposely introduce my child to harm in the way of any disease. Obviously I would never want her to experience flu, measles or even chicken pox to the extent that has been described as lethal or debilitating. But exposing her to the effects of vaccines (or grandpa visiting for a week – physiologic stress) does the same thing. We’re left wondering how exactly to protect her to the best extent possible and what this means for our younger son. Our daughter is fully immunized because no one would listen to me and I thought I “had” to vaccinate. When my son had the same reactions as my daughter at two months old, I stopped vaccinating him completely until someone could answer why my kids reacted so poorly. Now that we know it’s likely mito disease, I wonder what effect vaccines would have on my son. And know that any viral infection they get from just being out and about could have the same effect.

It makes me think of Hannah Poling and wonder if vaccines didn’t trigger all that has happened to her, a different infection, at a different time, would have. But how, as a parent, do you willingly march your child into that?

It’s a rock on one side and a hard place on the other.