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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Worth reposting:

[quote]Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.

“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.

“I feel all sleepy,” she said.

In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.

The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her.

On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunized against measles.

- Roald Dahl[/quote]

https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/roald-dahl-lost-his-daughter-to-measles-his-heartbreaking-letter-on-vaccination-is-very-relevant-today/[/quote]

Olivia Dahl died on November 17, 1962, at the age of seven. She died just one year before the first measles vaccine was licensed in the U.S. and six years before it became available in Britain.

How can we allow as a society people without the measles vaccine who have no medical reason not to be vaccinated to attend schools, fly on planes, and attend places with large gatherings such as Disneyworld?  Currently only four states—California, Connecticut, Maine, and New York—prohibit non-medical (religious or philosophical) exemptions for school-entry vaccines.[/quote]

I totally agree. Unless you have a medical reason, you shouldn't be able to go to school or be in any public place without vaccines. If we do that, herd immunity will protect those who have medical reasons as well as those too young to be vaccinated and those who are immunocompromised.

These anti-vax mothers should feel responsible - I know this won't happen in a court of law, but they should be blamed and acknowledge the responsibility - not only for the illness of their children but for every person that child infects, and every person those people infect. RFK Jr should and Trump should be held legally responsible for all these hospitalizations and deaths.[/quote]

NP. I’m not an anti-vaxxer, but I’m not of your tribe, and I’m sure you’d be livid if someone you cared about had my views on these subjects. I’m genuinely curious about the following, and I don’t mean this rhetorically: if you had to, do you think you could articulate the reasons why some people suspect a connection between vaccination and developmental disability? I don’t mean an answer at the level of generality along the lines of “ignorance” or “anti-science,” but literally like a good-faith exposition of their position?[/quote]

PP, I am the person you quoted. Others have answered you but I want to reply as well in good faith.

I'll start with my own story. When I started having kids in the early 2000s I read A LOT about autism and vaccines. I read about regressions in kids who lost their speech. I have a family member who works with kids with autism who was a full on believer that vaccines were the cause and I asked her to explain. I read some of the key books about the rise in new childhood epidemics that had accompanied the elimination of certain diseases through vaccination. And I followed RFK Jr, this gutsy environmental lawyer. I asked my doctors about the dangers of vaccines and was frustrated by their total dismissal of my questions. On the one hand, I was able to VERY QUICKLY ) see that the science did not show - no, it disproved! (very obviously, irrefutably! - a causal link between the vaccines and autism. On the other hand, I empathized with mothers who were asking questions and being treated like idiots. I was absolutely annoyed and irritated with doctors and discussed this pattern with all my many physician friends. I told them how dangerous the pat dismissals were because they were making enemies out of people asking legitimate questions that did not have clear answers. I have a close friend who write a book on the vaccine-autism debate and we had a big argument about this very issue. If I was super irritated, [i]me[/i], someone who was on the same side as the American Academy of Pediatrics and who, like the doctors, had gone to school until I was 30, how must younger, less privileged moms feel?

When two of my kids had challenges in their early years, you can imagine how worried I was (did I do something to make this happen?) and how much MORE I looked into these questions. I wanted to know if there was any way to help my kids and I had a motto: if no harm is done to the kid and the only sacrifice on my end is time or money, I'll do whatever I can to get my kids the treatment and intervention that could help. I tried a zillion different things with my children. I won't list them, but I promise you I have tried the cleanest diets and the weirdest therapies with the fullest effort and made them fun for the whole family.

When the answers are unknown, OF COURSE I'll explore and question and even try all sorts of solutions. But there are some studied and KNOWN facts here. It is not complicated, in fact it is very clear: vaccines do not cause autism. Also, these diseases harm, maim, kill people and not just the children in question but others whom they infect. These are crystal clear facts for anyone who actually seeks the truth. So, yes, I am extremely sympathetic and even empathetic toward the moms, but they are in the wrong here scientifically and ethically.[/quote]

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