Why I haven’t vaccinated my children…

Because I don’t have children!

Or, as Hugh Laurie says in an episode of Fry & Laurie, “only thanks to the purest good fortune that they don’t happen to have been born yet, otherwise I dread to think what damage may have been caused!”

When I do have kids (goats or humans) I will immunize them, in the same way that I was immunized.

I remember the day still. I was five, and had the afternoon off from school. That, in itself, was a boon. Wearing a Humphrey B. Bear t-shirt (a creepy, mute, honey-scoffing TV bear) I hopped aboard a mobile vaccination bus (not to be confused with the Creation bus) and was jabbed a couple of times. For this, I was rewarded with a packet of UFO chips (some things never change, eh?) and a Be Wise – Immunize sticker. I subsequently had my Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) shot.

I can state categorically that I’ve never had polio, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, mumps or rubella ever since.

Nor did I develop autism..

You see, no one has ever developed autism from an MMR vaccine, or any other vaccine.  That’s the simple truth.

I even read a skeptical article in the Sunday Mail’s usually unskeptical Body and Spirit that quotes Dr Andrew Marich, Director of Communicable Diseases in NSW, as saying that the MMR-Autism link has been “completely discredited.”

If a new age rag is finally expounding this message, then hasn’t the Hundreth Monkey effect been achieved? Not so, but these kinds of articles will do well to counter the scaremongering and unfounded controversy that is currently surrounding MMR and other vaccinations.

But a swag of scientific studies, journal articles and the world’s best minds can’t compete with a crying mother in an episode of Oprah.

The inaccurate belief that vaccination causes autism is countered with statistics that vaccination saves some three million lives per year.

Vaccinations are among the greatest breakthroughs in science and medicine in the last century.

If we’re not vigilent about vaccination, these diseases might return…

So…don’t immunize your children, if you’d rather risk that your child should be sterile, or have one leg shorter than the other, live in an iron lung, or not live at all…

These are things to really be scared about…