Editor’s note: This commentary is by Sarah Donegan of Shelburne.
[W]hat follows is my story: the immunization evolution of a fairly liberal, mostly atheist, generally health-conscious, science-preaching mother who was free-range parenting long before it had a name and a following.
I moved to Salem, Oregon, in the mid-’90s as a very green 21-year-old with a flair for the bohemian, a love for feminist bookstores, too many peasant skirts, and a desperate need to be loved and accepted. Salem was hardly a bastion of granola living, but it had its small, enthusiastic enclave of post-modern hippies who frequented the food co-op at the edge of town and gathered in the more beatnik of the town’s two coffee shops.
My decision to move out of Vermont after college was an attempt to start fresh. I’d gone to high school and college in my hometown, I’d had friends leave and relationships sour, I’d moved out of and into my parents’ home more than once, and I felt caged. I wanted to test my wings, my self-reliance. But after a few days alone in my furnitureless apartment on edge of downtown Salem, the dream of stretching my wings fading in the distance and loneliness taking hold, I went out looking for people like me. In Salem, the people like me were the ones in the co-op and the feminist bookstore and the hippie coffeeshop. I made friends, met my husband-to-be, and settled comfortably into a life where I challenged everything except my own beliefs and the beliefs of the community I chose as family.
My daughter Sophie was born into the loving, supportive arms of the husband and the community I called family. These were smart, generous, quiet people with strong convictions and a clear vision for their lives. I loved them and respected them and wanted so desperately to be a part of their community that I accepted without scrutiny their creed as my own. My identity was my husband’s and friends’ identities, but never my own. I lived my life by their convictions. There’s almost nothing I regret about how I chose to live my life at that time, for it brought me to where I am today: to two beautiful daughters, a loving (second) husband, two sweet stepchildren, a fulfilling job, a warm, comfortable home, and solid friendships.
There’s almost nothing I regret, except my decision not to vaccinate my children.
Distrust of vaccination was just another of the tenets of the lifestyle I chose for myself and my family at that time. It simply went hand-in-hand with attachment parenting, eschewing white bread and television, the family bed, unbleached cotton, baby wearing, homeopathy, organic food, sulfate-free detergent, composting, cloth diapers, and voting for Ralph Nader.
I didn’t separate one value from the others. I didn’t question the sanity or science behind choosing not to vaccinate. I heard the arguments against vaccination, nodded emphatically, and went along. I even found a pediatrician who supported my decision not to vaccinate and never presented me with evidence refuting my ridiculous theories.
Here are some of the arguments against vaccination that I accepted without question: vaccines cause autism; vaccines contain mercury and other chemicals that will poison your child; vaccines lead to neurological damage; pharmaceutical companies can’t be trusted; full vaccination leads to chronic illness; babies’ bodies can’t handle so many shots at once; it’s preferable to gain immunity “naturally”; we don’t know enough about the long-term effects of vaccination, so it’s better to err on the side of caution; diseases that vaccines target have essentially disappeared; if everyone else is vaccinating, you don’t need to.
It all made sense. If I wanted to protect my newborn — this little person I loved with an impossibly big love — I would not subject her to the dangers of vaccination.
So what changed? After all, I still hold close many of the values I embraced at that time. I believe attachment parenting works and that my adherence to it is one of the big reasons my daughters are such strong, confident, adventurous young women. I’m biased in favor of breastfeeding and think that everyone who can, should. I believe in the merits of a healthy diet and think composting is cool. I live beside a beautiful lake and wish more people used sulfate-free detergents. I’m still glad I used cloth diapers when my daughters were babies, thrilled though I am that I’ll never have to wash another diaper again now that they’re teenagers and I have vasectomy in my life. I’m glad I voted for Ralph Nader, though I probably never would again, should he ever decide to reignite his presidential ambitions.
Over the years, a few events planted the seeds of doubt, that maybe I’d made the wrong decision about vaccination.
The first came when little Sophie has just 4 weeks old. She woke up one morning with a fever of 103 degrees. We called our pediatrician (the one who never challenged our decision not to vaccinate), who advised us to give Sophie some baby Tylenol. We balked; we didn’t want to give our pure little child pharmaceuticals. The doctor relented and told us to rub garlic on the soles of Sophie’s feet every 15 minutes until we smelled garlic on her breath. (To this day, I have no idea what on earth that little distraction was supposed to accomplish.) Four or five hours passed and Sophie’s fever had gone up to 104 degrees. We called the pediatrician again and she told us to take our daughter to the emergency room at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland. We were admitted immediately and Sophie was placed in the neonatal ICU. The doctor in the NICU told us that a fever so high in a baby so young was an indication that something was seriously wrong. It took 24 hours for the award-winning pediatric team at Doernbecher to diagnose our baby. She had a double kidney infection and sepsis, caused by a physiological condition called vesicoureteral reflux, or VUR. VUR is the backward flow of urine from the bladder into the kidneys. It’s caused by a congenital defect in the valves that regulate the flow of urine from the kidneys, causing dangerous bacteria to reach the kidneys and leading to kidney damage and scarring. Essentially, Sophie had a UTI that went septic. The treatment was massive doses of broad-spectrum antibiotics, administered by IV, meaning that Sophie was going to be in the NICU for a few days.
The activist announced without a hint of shame or embarrassment in his voice, he changed his mind on GMOs. He went from being a vocal opponent to a staunch supporter of genetically modified foods. I was struck and moved, not only by his admission that he’d been wrong, but also by the fact that after his personal journey, evidence became more important than ideology.
On the day that Sophie was released from the hospital, we sat down with the doctor to discuss followup and next steps. Sophie would have one more week of antibiotics, administered by needle, twice a day, at our local health clinic. She would then go on a daily prophylactic dose of amoxicillin until the age of 5, when she would undergo surgery to correct the valve defect.
I told the doctor that we were uncomfortable with subjecting our daughter to five years of a daily dose of a mainstream medication and inquired about “naturopathic” alternatives.
The doctor looked at me with an expression that can only be described as a combination of bewilderment, disbelief and anger. I was told, quite empathically, that there was no “naturopathic” alternative and that it would be downright irresponsible to reject his advice. He made it quite clear that that was the end of the discussion. He rose, gave my daughter a tender rub of the head, shot me a dirty look, and strode from the room.
That encounter with that incredibly talented and caring doctor at one of America’s top children’s hospitals was the first chip in my anti-vaxxer armor. Here was the man who had just saved my infant daughter’s life, insisting that mainstream medicine, evidence-based medicine, was the only way to keep her safe. It got me thinking. But not enough to wear down completely my righteous resistance.
My second daughter, Eleanor, was born two years later and we didn’t vaccinate her, either.
But by now, we had moved away from our insulated community in Salem, Oregon, and I was a little older, a little more secure in who I was, less scared of not being loved, and little more willing to explore ideas outside of those I’d always held as gospel.
And then a series of things happened in my life and in the world:
Climate change denial hit the scene in a big way.
Eleanor got a double ear infection, was prescribed penicillin, had an allergic reaction,and developed hives which I thought were chickenpox. I surprised myself by feeling relieved that it was hives and not chickenpox after all.
There was a whooping cough outbreak in my little state and I worried about taking my girls to the grocery store.
Eleanor fell and cracked her head open and it was easy to let the doctor convince me to allow her to get a tetanus shot.
I went in for an annual check-up with my own doctor and when she asked me if I wanted a flu shot, I said, “sure.”
The GMO debate heated up.
And then this happened: I was listening to an interview with an environmental activist while commuting home one evening and was clucking sympathetically as he expressed his frustration with climate-change deniers, especially those in public office. The conversation wandered to GMOs. The activist asserted that he used to be adamantly against all GMOs, but at the insistence of a colleague, researched the issue more carefully and concluded that not only were GMOs safe, but that the anti-GMO movement was driven by fear, not evidence, and that he had fallen prey to that fear. With that, he announced without a hint of shame or embarrassment in his voice, he changed his mind on GMOs. He went from being a vocal opponent to a staunch supporter of genetically modified foods.
I was struck and moved, not only by his admission that he’d been wrong, but also by the fact that after his personal journey, evidence became more important than ideology. I wanted to reach into the radio and hug him. Mark Lynas, in a five-minute radio interview, had just changed my life.
I started thinking about ideology and mental flexibility and my decade-old decision not to vaccinate my daughters. I decided it was time to revisit that decision and I dove into research, carefully avoiding ideological sources (particularly websites). I waded methodically through source data. I came to four important conclusions:
- Evidence supporting the safety and efficacy of modern vaccines is overwhelming. Evidence to the contrary is not.
- Even if vaccines caused life and wellbeing-threatening injuries at the rate claimed by anti-vaccination activists (and they don’t), those injuries would still pale in comparison to the number of people (particularly our society’s most vulnerable) who would be injured or killed were diseases like measles, whooping cough, rubella, mumps, hepatitis, polio, tetanus and diphtheria allowed to spread uncontrolled.
- My decision not to vaccinate had placed my daughters’ health and safety at risk and I am incredibly fortunate that they never contracted a vaccine-preventable disease.
- My decision not to vaccinate had placed other people’s health and wellbeing at risk and I could have never lived with myself had someone who couldn’t be vaccinated and relied on herd immunity contracted a vaccine-preventable disease from one of my children.
- My daughters’ father and I talked and agreed it was time to vaccinate our children.
And so, at the ages of 11 and 13, my daughters went in for their first round of immunizations. They each got five shots that day. They had sore arms for a couple of days.
My older daughter, about a week later, had this to say: “I’m really glad we got the shots. It was starting to make me uncomfortable that I wasn’t vaccinated. Thank you.”
From the mouths of babes …
