Ex-Anti-Vaxxers Explain Why They Now Vaccinate Their Children - AskReddit

I had an extreme needle phobia it wasn't exactly rational hex anti-vaxxers what made you change your mind I wasn't but my family was they stopped being anti-vaxxers when they found out that I was autistic well my mother was one until I was 14 around the same time she found out that her essential oil treatments on me only made things worse I grew up in the Middle East where we had no clues about vaccines and when we moved to the US my parents got really into the antibac stuff my daughter was born in 2001 before the study had been thoroughly debunked and proved and willfully fraudulent so I did ask the pediatrician about it and he immediately put my mind at ease thus concluded Annie and all worries and concerns I ever had on the matter I was a homeopathic medicine believing Crunchie who grew up in the 70s I believe vaccinations would diminish a person's immune system and contracting an illness would help one develop resistance to the illnesses of the world I know stupid I ended up getting my kids vaccinated when one was 8 and the other 2 one day it dawned on me that if my child caught a communicable disease like mumps or measles he could inadvertently pass it to a fetus in utero if he was near a pregnant woman and the mother's resistance was low and my thought process was that she could not get vaccinated to protect her baby if she was pregnant but my child could essentially the whole notion of herd immunity smack me upside the head and I will Cup I became a nurse practitioner and spent a lot of time studying vaccines and their effectiveness versus the disease's they prevent I had to emotionally separate myself from the issue it is built entirely on emotion rather than evidence I approach life with an evidence-based attitude except for vaccines I used to be very religious but realized once I removed emotion from the equation there was only facts that were not in the religious favor same with vaccines I still had deep fear what I vaccinated my children I still have knee-jerk fearful reactions of it but I remind myself that my fear doesn't outweigh facts and the facts were in favor of the vaccines I think pro vaccine people don't take the fear aspect into account my daughter is completely vaccinated and on sched but the conversation has come up between parents and you can kind of tell when someone is listening because they are anti-vaxxer leaning that way but is scared to say it I fully knowing vaccinations are great having never set otherwise often have to stop people ranting about how stupid can you be and say I understand why it's scary even you are know that it won't cause autism there's a list of side effects that is really daunting sure you are used to taking advil and it has a warning your limbs will fall off and turn your hair green and you know it's just a percentage of a percentage of a chance so they must list it but your six-month-old can even take cold medicine and seems to have all sorts of gastro issues when you eat green onions and then breastfeed so why wouldn't you take the possible side effect list seriously why wouldn't you wonder if this is the best system or not you see these women breath a sigh of relief and bam they're open because you showed an ounce of empathy to them and now they're at least listening and you can say but you see a single photo of a child with polio and read an article that quotes several peer-reviewed articles let's be honest I can't make it through an actual academic article on medicine it's too jargon filled understandability and I'll be lost and you can see and know that this isn't something happening blindly and trust your medical professional enough to get vaccines for your child and on time I've always been evidenced focused over emotionally-driven which is why I never subscribed to any religion either where we differ however is the fear with vaccines I was always afraid of my kids not getting vaccinated and not being protected even if vaccines diid cause autism the alternative is death and I don't know about you but on whether my kid be autistic than dead anti-vaxxers infuriated me beyond reason and because of that I could never argue a point with one the stupidity for one of better terminology drove me so insane I couldn't function or put proper sentences together because number one they were factually wrong in number two emotionally to me at least they should be probe acts anyway I couldn't understand how you can protect your children by not protecting your children my family was very into all things natural and holistic growing up vaccines were poisoning your body and preventing your immune system from fighting off germs I just believed what my family said and never wanted to rock the boat then I went to medical school and learned real science and off to get all my vaccines I went some of my family still doesn't know that I got them I was in anti-vaxxer because I have a terrible extreme phobia of needles that result in full-on panic attacks and other unpleasantness so you can imagine how extremely pleased I was to discover a way to legitimize my desire to avoid them at all costs yes especially since I was raised among people who took the ideas behind anti-vaxxer meant seriously but otherwise called me a wimp for being afraid so when I left for university and found myself among people who were super understanding of my fears but thought my anti-vaxxer pinions were disgusting things started to change I came to terms with the fact that I don't think I ever really believed that vaccines were bad as evidenced by the fact that I was never capable of properly articulating what was bad about them and started dealing with my phobia properly I was anti vaccine yet had a kid with autism I was so ignorant of the truth of vaccines but also too ignorant about autism it's not a death sentence it's not to be feared my kid with autism is a fantastic human and I often wish more people were like him so anyway when I had my next kid I've axed on schedule and he's pretty neurotypical just a smidge of ADHD so along with my own anecdotal experience I did the research read a lot and learned that the Wakefield study was BS and that vaccines don't cause autism or ADHD but in defense of my ignorant self when you're a new parent you're vulnerable to fear-mongering thankfully I saw the light my mom was into all kinds of spiritual stuff while I was growing up psychic readings some kind of healing hearts group etc when I was having mental health problems that got sent to the nature of path then in university I sat in on a health paper that talked about the toxicity of beauty products how some medications aren't necessary and provided a bunch of examples of where doctors have gone horribly wrong in the past for example advocating smoking it just trains you into thinking medication is bad that doctors are trying to trick you I started at a new workplace and didn't put my name down to get a flu shot one of my co-workers sat me down and asked me why and ended up showing me a bunch of things to help me see why it was okay without being judgmental my partner was also a huge influence his sister had many health problems growing up and without doctors she just wouldn't be alive so he helped me gain trust in doctors again now I keep a healthy balance I'm still suspicious of the beauty industry but a faith in doctors again - I'm on medication for my mental health which was a big step and I am definitely not anti VAX my brother's wife however is still anti-vaccine emore it amazes me actually the kind of people who are anti evacs my manager at work was incredibly intelligent but it was like she thought she was smarter than doctors in their decades of research we ended up having an argument about me getting a flu shot and decided not to talk about vaccines ever again although every year when the flu shot came around she tried I come from a country where medical care is also very regulated so we don't have opioid issues like some places do I think one bad experience can make people distrust doctors go on google and find a natural answer to every problem the spread of misinformation is so widespread these days it's incredibly difficult to know what the right answer is I was lucky enough to find people who helped me I was leaning towards vaccines being kinda scary and having dodgy stuff in them I was raised in Scientology and a lot of my family was and still mostly is other than some of my siblings pretty susceptible to conspiracy theories I got away from this mindset by getting some serious mental problems and realizing that Scientology had nothing at all to deal with any real mental issues I was very religious so this stuff along with the mental issues and a few other things completely destroyed my world at a fundamental level I slowly rebuild my philosophy of determining truth and determining right and wrong until I was at an okay level then I was helped even further when I started watching a streamer and youtuber who has had much more time to hammer out pretty much the system I was aiming for by explaining burden of proof better than I knew it and pointing out plenty of bad argument tactics and logical he's as well as common mistakes people make with interpreting statistics luckily my parents are okay with me not being a Scientologist and the church is too disorganized to even know I'm not a Scientologist anymore despite me now telling two of their staff that I'm not I was never an anti-vaxxer but I know the first time I heard about the autism link from dr. oz I didn't really think of it and I didn't really need boosters and had no one to get vaccinate I remember my first months on Reddit I brought it up on a thread and I'm sure I got smacked down but I was a skeptic in the making and there were enough sources that I found quickly it was easy to correct the wrong information I realized that I was being manipulated due to my fears and the fact I was very ill at the time and didn't know why I was told that the government was killing me among other anti evacs stuff with fluoride and chemicals and that I was going to have a terrible quality of life by helpful members of the anti-vaccine alt health community and when I said something that didn't fit the narrative I was verbally attacked for being a corporate shill there are two parts to the entire community one part is the people like me who are just scared and concerned due to the many different things we hear maybe we're inexperienced parents maybe we're sick etc but we're hearing so many different things due to the age we live in and we're generally scared / concerned / trying to do what's best the other part is the predatory people who prey on the first group in order to accomplish some type of goal whether that's a following or money or a sense of satisfaction not me a work friend her sister had nearly died after receiving a vaccine for HPV she was literally the only anti-vaxxer I knew that knew genuine real case of a vaccine going wrong the sister gets unwell again shock horror the doctor's verdict she wouldn't be a death story again if the people around her were vaccinated she's got a very weak immune system she's relying on all of you to protect yourselves to protect her magically my work friend becomes a huge advocate for vaccinations so like most of the stories it took someone nearly dying to change her views it wasn't something that happened in a moment all at once or had a single trigger I was passionately anti-vaxxers a teenager in the 1990s and then I became interested in and passionate about other things I studied science and history and philosophy of science and loved it at uni and then one day I realized that my feelings around vaccinations had changed I am now passionately Pro vaccinations I think the first but not the biggest thing was reading science blogs online and people who are not just probe X but anti anti VAX as humans we can never know everything or assess all of the available information we're small chunks of meat full of bias but realizing that educated and clever people had read all of the anti-vaxxer comments and dismissed them was reassuring as well as eye-opening because as anti vaccine I had been sure that we were the galileo's of the argument that the probe acts people were closing their eyes to the truth and refusing to engage with us that they'd realized the truth if only they knew how bad vaccines were so it was reassuring to me to see that other people had dismissed those arguments not out of denial and fear but because they were bad arguments we weren't Galileo we were Columbus wrong all along and responsible for a lot of unnecessary deaths the biggest thing that really changed my mind and made me passionate about being probe X was that I learned that measles are really bad that these rite-of-passage childhood illnesses weren't healthy and priming the immune system that they killed people a lot of people whooping cough kills people measles can make your immune system basically reboot itself so you're no longer immune to the things you were immune to before you got the measles nearly a year ago I posted a tweet that some people liked you might have seen it already but I think it sums up what changed my mind and how pretty well people say well what did people do before vaccine slash antibiotics slash pasteurization as if that's an argument for going natural they died caryl a lot of people died not me but a colleague the topic of the flu vaccine came up because I had recently gotten it I find the flu shot is the one vaccine that is socially acceptable to skip on in question even among the probe Xers if I may call us this way I get it mostly to avoid giving the flu to my older parents who wouldn't be able to get through it at their age my colleague was half mocking me being a bit gullible about the importance of the flu shot three weeks later her oldest son got sick and tested positive to influenza he got so sick he had to be admitted and was on for for a few days her second son got it to convulsive fevers and all then she got it and her ten month old daughter got it everyone eventually got better but they spent a little over three months being sick and getting over at all a hard-earned lesson if you ask me but people really underestimate influenza it's not a bad cold it can kill you if you're not in good shape to start with thanks for listening to another episode of Big Pharma propaganda TTS hit the subscribe button for more brainwashing in favor of Big Pharma and the devil and let me know your own anti-vaxxers in the comments below

Channel: Radio TTS

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Id: jvIBe3xCtTE

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 13 2019