My Vaccine Decision: Delayed Vaccinations continued...
Do you ever worry about your decision?
No, I definitely would do it again the same way. I was particularly glad with my second child, because as she got older I found that she was the one who had a lot of problems with her immune system. I think it’s good that I followed my mother’s instincts and waited, because she probably would have had much more trouble handling shots earlier, as weak as her immune system was.
How do you feel about your decision now?
I definitely would do it again the same way. I just wanted to do what was best for my babies. I noticed that the older my girls were were, the faster they recovered from immunization, with fevers, irritability, and how much it hurt them. I mentioned to my sister that I found this approach worked for me, and she did the same with one of her kids and agreed that it worked better.
Public health officials stress that vaccination is important for the public good, not just the individual child. Do you agree or disagree, and why?
I totally believe in vaccines, I think they’ve changed the world. I do genealogy as a hobby, and when I looked at my family history, I saw how many people died of diphtheria. When you go into these cemeteries and see these teeny little gravestones next to the parents and can see they all died within a week of each other, that’s powerful. There’s an older pioneer-type cemetery not too far from here, with a book that lists what everybody died of. Over 60% of people in that cemetery are children under the age of five who mostly died of vaccine-preventable diseases.
My Vaccine Decision: No Vaccinations
Krista DiBlanca, 24, nanny/stay-at-home mom, Red Hook, N.Y.
What did you decide about vaccines?
My husband and I decided not to vaccinate our daughter, who is now 14 months old.
Right now, she is completely unvaccinated.
How did you make that decision? Where did you seek your information?
When I was pregnant, we started looking into whether or not we were going to vaccinate and which vaccines we were going to do. We haven’t taken it off the table completely, but we’re just really concerned about a lot of the adverse side effects, and I’m talking now about the ones that are proven, even though they’re rare. There are just so many unknowns.
We read and referred to Dr. William Sears’ Vaccine Book quite often, and had originally talked about following his schedule, but it just didn’t feel right to us. We had a gut feeling that we needed to hold off on them and wait and see as she gets older if we feel she needs anything.
