I was raised antivax, got the measles at age 17, and was still antivax for roughly 10 more years. It was my wife that convinced me to actually think about it, because she was adamant about vaccinating any children we had. I have her to thank for making me less ignorant. My sisters, on the other hand, are all still antivax despite my attempts to convince them otherwise.
She said she was planning to get our first child vaccinated, and if I had a problem with that, I could raise my concerns to the pediatrician. I’m non-confrontational enough that I didn’t push the issue any further, but I was still terrified that our first child was going to suffer from a vaccine injury.
I think me being scared about my son was enough to get me to look more closely at how research like Andrew Wakefield’s had to be faked to get the results he wanted and that no one else could duplicate his findings, and one of those replication studies was even performed by an undergrad student that I realized had no “big pharma” incentive to lie about it. By the time our second child was born, I was already anti-antivax.
Oh interesting. Thanks for sharing. Would you say the anti-Vax position was something you adopted because of the context you grew up in? In other words: it wasn’t a stance you assumed independently, right?
Yes, it was definitely a product of indoctrination from my dad, who was a chiropractor (my grandpa was also a chiropractor); he was very knowledgeable in other medical areas like anatomy, so it was difficult for me to realize he was wrong about this.
Though, I did write an argumentative paper for high school English about why vaccines were less effective than we thought, and should not be worth the risk. I even used statistics from the same measles outbreak I was part of as proof, because 50% of those who got the measles were vaccinated. Of course, I was too dumb at the time to realize that 50 people from a vaccinated pool of 200,000 doesn’t equate to 50 people from an unvaccinated pool of 10,000 (I don’t remember exact numbers anymore, this was almost 30 years ago).
I was raised antivax, got the measles at age 17, and was still antivax for roughly 10 more years. It was my wife that convinced me to actually think about it, because she was adamant about vaccinating any children we had. I have her to thank for making me less ignorant. My sisters, on the other hand, are all still antivax despite my attempts to convince them otherwise.
No judgement here. Just curious what or how your wife approached the topic?
“Hey Fuckface…”
She said she was planning to get our first child vaccinated, and if I had a problem with that, I could raise my concerns to the pediatrician. I’m non-confrontational enough that I didn’t push the issue any further, but I was still terrified that our first child was going to suffer from a vaccine injury.
I think me being scared about my son was enough to get me to look more closely at how research like Andrew Wakefield’s had to be faked to get the results he wanted and that no one else could duplicate his findings, and one of those replication studies was even performed by an undergrad student that I realized had no “big pharma” incentive to lie about it. By the time our second child was born, I was already anti-antivax.
Oh interesting. Thanks for sharing. Would you say the anti-Vax position was something you adopted because of the context you grew up in? In other words: it wasn’t a stance you assumed independently, right?
Yes, it was definitely a product of indoctrination from my dad, who was a chiropractor (my grandpa was also a chiropractor); he was very knowledgeable in other medical areas like anatomy, so it was difficult for me to realize he was wrong about this.
Though, I did write an argumentative paper for high school English about why vaccines were less effective than we thought, and should not be worth the risk. I even used statistics from the same measles outbreak I was part of as proof, because 50% of those who got the measles were vaccinated. Of course, I was too dumb at the time to realize that 50 people from a vaccinated pool of 200,000 doesn’t equate to 50 people from an unvaccinated pool of 10,000 (I don’t remember exact numbers anymore, this was almost 30 years ago).