Grew up anti-vax

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I want to share my experience growing up anti-vax. This isn’t to be rude to anyone pro-vax or anti-vax, but just to share my experience and my reasoning throughout my life. I hope that it may help some understand where anti-vaxxers are coming from, and I hope that it may also help some anti-vaxxers consider their decision.

I was never vaccinated for anything as a child. The reason why, was because one time my mom was babysitting her younger sister who had just gotten a vaccine that morning. Her eyes went crossed, and my mom was extremely freaked out and assumed it was the vaccine since it had been given to her that morning (I’m not commenting one way or the other on if it was vaccine or not, because I have absolutely no way to know that, and that’s not what this post is about. If this freaks people out towards vaccines, that’s fair. Again, I’m just sharing my story. I will say though, I know this experience really scared my mother, so I do understand her connecting it to the vaccine). My aunt was given special glasses and she fully recovered. And yes, this is a true story. She had no other issues health wise btw.

I continued to be wary of vaccines for most of my life. I’d heard the story about my aunt, and my mother was worried maybe we had some genetic predisposition that made vaccines dangerous for us. I had whooping cough as a toddler, chickenpox as a child, and measles as a teenager. None of these caused major issues for me or any long-term health damage. The one thing I will say is that I don’t remember whooping cough, but the stories sounded scary. My older sister had it and literally would have bouts of being unable to breathe, so my dad would take her outside to breathe cold air (idk if that’s actually supposed to help, that’s just what he chose to do for it).

When COVID happened I was very against the vaccine and very afraid of it. I didn’t understand how people could take a vaccine that was so new to the market and not be nervous. I was also particularly nervous because I’d never had ANY vaccine so I didn’t know if I’d have an allergic reaction.

Eventually, as I did research on the vaccine, and as I saw people around me take it without issues, I opted to get one dose and see how I did.

I felt fine so I got the second.

Now this is the important part of my post IMO: This led me to start researching other vaccines. I had never read what kind of things these different viruses like measles, polio, tetanus etc. can do to people.

As I read about each virus, I decided to catch up on my childhood vaccines. Here was my reasoning: Tetanus can kill you. It is a horrific and painful death. Even if you live through it, you will have lifelong health problems, chronic pain, and probably PTSD from the experience.

With measles, if you’re around an unvaccinated pregnant woman, you can cause her baby to have permanent, major birth defects.

With polio, I always thought if I didn’t have it as a kid I’d be fine as an adult. I was wrong: it causes MORE severe nerve damage in adults, and can cause you to be paralyzed from the neck down, unable to breathe on your own for the rest of your life. It is irreversible nerve damage.

I’m not trying to scare anyone. I just want to say, that as I researched these different illnesses, I realized that we vaccinate for sickness that we otherwise can’t do anything about, and that are debilitating or fatal.

And yes, someone could look at something like Guillian Barré syndrome, and say that that is just as bad as polio. Personally, I have known two people who had Guillian Barré. Of the two, I know one came from a vaccine. She made a full recovery within months. With polio, there is no recovery. And even if my friend had never recovered, she was still able to walk, although with difficulty, she was able to breathe and eat on her own, and live a normal life.

With tetanus, I thought about the potential adverse reactions I could have from the vaccine, and I realized that any adverse reaction would be better than death. Even if the vaccine killed me, I realized it would’ve been a better death than a death by tetanus.

So all I’m saying to anti-vaxxers out there, please make sure that you do research on what you’re not vaccinating against, and what can go wrong if you do contract these different illnesses. And please weigh the risks and negative outcomes of either vaccinating and something going wrong, or getting one of these illnesses and something going wrong.

I never did that. Maybe all of you anti-vaxxers have. If so, then great. I just never realized that for myself, I hadn’t actually made an informed decision on it. I had listened to what my parents told me without looking at both sides.

And for pro-vaxxers reading this, I hope this helps you understand where some are coming from with vaccine hesitancy. You hear scary stories about adverse reactions, and sometimes it can feel that doctors push vaccines, which made me skeptical, because I thought it was all about money for them.

If you read all of this, thanks.