Parents Don’t Know Best: Get Your Child Vaccinated or Go To Jail

Get Your Child Vaccinated or Go To Jail — by Catherine Morgan (cross-posted at CatherineBlogs.com)

More problems associated with vaccines, this time the controversy is with the Chicken Pox vaccine. I haven’t been silent about my distrust with the pharmaceutical industry, and most recently with the collaboration between this industry and our government…specifically the rush to make the HPV vaccine mandatory for 9 to 12 year old girls. As much as I have a problem with *some* vaccines, I have a much larger problem with our government forcing parents to vaccinate for viruses such as Chicken Pox and HPV.

I am not someone who is against childhood vaccinations, as a nurse I fully understand the necessity for vaccinating children against polio, measles, mumps, and rubella. However, vaccinating against these diseases was begun for the sole purpose of saving the lives of children, that can not be said for most of the newer vaccines (Flu, HPV, Chicken Pox, Hepatitis, etc). The sole purpose for pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines today, is for one purpose and one purpose only…money (and a lot of it). I wont be able to go into each one in detail for this post (maybe in a future one), but here are a few statistics to just give you an idea of what I am talking about.

But now, let me talk specifically about the Chicken Pox vaccine and this latest controversy.

In Maryland parents are being threatened with fines and jail if they do not comply with vaccinating their children for chicken pox. Does anyone NOT see how insane that sounds? What the bleepidy-bleep is going on????

Speaking as one of the lucky ones, who lived through “The Great Chicken Pock Pandemic” of the 1970’s…oh wait, there was no pandemic and everyone I knew got the chicken pox and a couple days off from school, and actually lived to tell the tale. For those of us old enough to remember having the chicken pox…The memories are horrifying…the pustules, the itch, the dreaded calamine lotion. If you haven’t been through it yourself, you can not begin to imagine what we suffered with for those never ending couple of days. [My attempt as sarcasm…I know, don’t quit my day job.]

Seriously now. When my children were born (and at that time the vaccine was not yet mandatory), the pediatrician told me about it, and I decided that if my children weren’t exposed to the virus before they would be attending school, then I would consider it. [CHOICE…it’s a beautiful thing, but becoming more and more rare in our society.] My reservations had nothing to do with a possible adverse reaction to the vaccine…It was the fact that, getting chicken pox as a child is not serious, and getting the virus actually gives a life-long immunity (the vaccine does not). I also wondered why anyone would consider this vaccine, when there was already an anti-viral medication available, that reduced the severity of the symptoms and cut the duration of the illness?

READ FULL POST AT CatherineBlog.com