Vaccination Investigation

The subject of vaccinations is of importance to me because I strongly believe in childhood vaccines. Robert F. Kennedy has plans for vaccines, and the Left is in a tizzy over it, so I wanted to discuss it a bit. But first…

A bit of background on me. My first daughter was born in the 90s, and as a dutiful parent, I took her in for her first set of shots when I was told to. She got her shot, and about 30 minutes after she got it, she started screaming. Not crying, but screaming, that sound that causes parents to run to the ER. I thought at first it was just a bit of lingering pain from the shot, so I did warm washcloths at the vaccination site, baby Tylenol, snuggles, breastfeeding, all that stuff. The screaming continued. She barely breathed. It was just a continuous scream, like the sound out of a piece of machinery. I called my doctor, and in the middle of that call, she stopped. Other than the fact that she was exhausted from screaming for a couple of hours, it was like nothing happened. She was bubbly, happy, eating again… My doctor suggested that we wait until she was older to get any further vaccinations, because that was definitely Not Normal.

I ended up not getting any of her childhood vaccines. I was too afraid that she would end up screaming and in pain again. By the time my daughter was about 3 or 4, Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a study that made claims he had proven that vaccines caused autism. I skimmed his study, but at the time I was not a good researcher, nor was I an experienced adult. I assumed that Dr. Wakefield wouldn’t have been published if his study wasn’t good. I decreed that my child would never be vaccinated again.

Of course, that didn’t happen. To get my kid into school, I had to get her vaccinated. I didn’t live in the States at the time, and my option was to lie and say I was a member of a religion that didn’t allow vaccinations. That was the only exception allowed. I didn’t lie, and my kid got vaccinated, in a truncated schedule that allowed her to enter kindergarten with her peers. She was fine, and she’s not autistic.

We now know, of course, that Dr. Wakefield’s study(1) was critically flawed, and that vaccines do not cause autism. In fact, not only is there no causation, there’s not even any correlation. His study and one other made some extremely bad jumps in (lack of) logic and the scare of the late 90s and early 2000s was enacted. I was caught up in that. I did not want my later children to be vaccinated, because my memory of my first child’s experience, along with my emotional reaction to the study, put me into a froth. My partner explained that the study was wrong, and sent me off to learn more about it.

That led to one of my first true research deep dives. I had to educate myself in order to understand a lot of what I was reading. I didn’t want to depend on experts, because it was an “expert” who had misled me the first time. By the time I was done, I was not only willing to get the kids vaccinated, I was demanding we do so.

That same fervor for vaccination led to me wanting to get the COVID shot, and encouraging (and in some cases, bullying) family to do the same. I have a friend who spent 40 years of her life working as an epidemiologist, and did some of the early work on mRNA vaccines in the 1990s. I trust that friend, and so I listened very carefully to everything she said about COVID and the vaccines that were coming out. Her educated medical opinion was that they were safe for adults and older children (those who had hit puberty), likely safe for younger children (as she said, she took her grandkids in to get the jab as soon as they qualified), and imperative for older folks (like herself). The fact that she’d worked with the prototypes of the vaccines, and that she understood the medical stuff that I simply couldn’t because I’m not a doctor, was enough for me.

Now, Chris will tell you that I drank the koolaid on the COVID jab. He could be right, and I accept that. But I also stand by the fact that my decisions were led not just by my feelings and emotions (and my anxiety), but by medical personnel I trusted, and medical places I trusted (Johns Hopkins and Mayo Clinic, to name two). I also trusted Fauci, and I’m not so sure right now that THAT trust was warranted. But the rest I stand by.

In any case, what I wanted to talk about was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plan to study current vaccinations. I want to say up front, I never have a problem with studying things. As our science changes and gets better and more exact, we should be taking at least a casual look into things we previously considered “settled science,” because science is about investigation. Some of our vaccinations have changed since we, the writers and readers of Vine of Liberty, were kids. It’s time for the new batch of scientists to investigate.

The current batch of vaccines we foist onto our children are the following (in order they’re usually received)):

• HepB
• RSV (respiratory virus)
• DTaP (diptheria, tetanus, whooping cough)
• Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type b)
• IPV (polio)
• Rotavirus
• PCV (Pneumococcal disease)
• Covid-19
• Flu
• Chickenpox
• MMR (measles, mumps, rubella)
• HPV (Human papillomavirus)
• MenACWY (meningococcal meningitis)
• MenB (meningococcal meningitis, different version)

As adults, we also generally get these:

• Covid-19
• Flu
• Pneumococcal (pneumonia)
• Shingles
• DTaP (because tetanus and whooping cough immunization fades)
• RSV (for older adults, especially those in nursing homes)

So as you can see, there’s a lot. What I didn’t include is that most of the childhood vaccines aren’t given just once, but up to five times. There are reasons (and generally GOOD reasons) for doing so. Giving smaller doses over time allows a child’s immune system to ramp up and do the best job at protecting them.

There are some vaccinations that are important enough that I do consider it important enough that I think the government should intervene to make sure they happen. Having talked with Chris, I would say that I stand JUST shy of mandates, but only barely, and only under some circumstances. the bottom line is that while I don’t think our government knows what’s best for us, I also know for a fact that there are a lot of really stupid parents out there. I don’t want my kid to get sick because “that kid’s mom” was an idiot.

As a country, we had basically eradicated measles in the early 2000s. We’re now seeing an uptick, and it’s largely among the unvaccinated (2). “Fear of autism was the most cited reason for MMR hesitancy. Vaccine hesitancy to MMR and other childhood vaccines clustered in middle- to high-income areas among mothers with a college-level education or higher who preferred internet/social media narratives over physician-based vaccine information.” (3) That damned study, despite being debunked thoroughly, is still causing problems.

Now… What I am not seeing are current studies on how the various vaccines interact with one another. We have studied how the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines work together, because when we switched from three separate shots to the one MMR shot in the late 70s and early 80s, a bunch of studies were done. Frankly, there hasn’t been a whole lot of study on the interaction of vaccines, or their larger impact, since the early 2000s. I look forward to seeing what kind of studies RFK implements, and what they’ll tell us.

All of that still leaves us with the concern that we’ll have a thwack of unvaccinated kids in the public schools, passing around disease. Yes, having online school works for some kids, and that’s a valid option (it was great for our kids, and that wasn’t due to vaccination concerns). But what about kids who simply don’t do well online, but who are unable to be vaccinated? Do we relegate them to online because they can’t get vaccinated?

The other questions I have are about costs. There are costs to everything, and we have to look at the bigger picture as well as the individual one. What is the cost of not vaccinating? There will be a rise in the number of dead and developmentally delayed children. There will likely be a larger number of parents who are forced to not work, in order to take care of their children. And in true Right fashion, I ask… why should I pay for those parents to stay home and care for their sick kids, when it was eminently preventable?

Chris suggested that, at the point this is an issue, the government should come out with better documentation. Doctors should be more transparent about how immunization works, and why it’s important. But if we’re doing that now and it isn’t working, why would it work going forward? How do we deal with it? I’d very much like to say that if your child is not immunized by choice, then it is YOUR child who should go to school online, and not the kid who’s immunized, or the kid who can’t be due to medical issues.

I am very much looking forward to seeing what RFK does with all this. I believe he’ll address a lot of the questions I’ve asked. I plan on writing some of this onto the Policies for the People site as well. I have hope that it will work out. And frankly, I don’t have any skin in the game right now. All our kids are grown. What they do with their bodies is up to them. If they have kids, it’ll be up to them to wrestle with this stuff.

(1) Eggerston, Laura. Lancet Retracts 12-Year-Old Article Linking Autism to MMR Vaccines. PMC2831678, Canadian Medical Association, 4 Feb. 2010, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2831678/.

(2) CDC. “Measles Cases and Outbreaks.” Measles (Rubeola), 6 Dec. 2024, https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html.

(3) Novilla, M. Lelinneth B., et al. “Why Parents Say No to Having Their Children Vaccinated against Measles: A Systematic Review of the Social Determinants of Parental Perceptions on MMR Vaccine Hesitancy.” Vaccines, vol. 11, no. 5, May 2023, p. 926. PubMed Central, https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines11050926.