Here is a story by a nurse practitioner, who was raised by a pediatrician, which was shared on X, formerly Twitter about traditional vaccines, that is vaccines that we are given as babies and later on throughout childhood. Since the tweet is a bit long, I have divided it into three blogs. It is definitely worth a read.
“I know many people post on here requesting to hear from medical professionals so here you go. I’m a nurse practitioner and here is my story. My dad is a pediatrician and I was raised as conventional as you can get. If we had a fever, we took Tylenol. Cough/congestion…we took cough medicine and often antibiotics. We went to every well visit and received all of our vaccines. It wasn’t even a question to not get them.
Fast forward and now I’m a nurse with 2 babies and they are, of course, all vaccinated per CDC schedule. Didn’t even question what was being injected into my babies, didn’t bat an eyelash. Because the pediatricians are the good guys, they know what is best for my child. I remember even joking with my mom when it came time for each of their 4 year old shots (oh no, we have the 4 year old shots coming up, they don’t know what they are in for poor things). It honestly makes me nauseated just thinking about it.
As a nurse I had to get a flu shot every year which I got the very first day it was offered and would fuss at my husband because he never got one. In fact, my nursing friends and I would make fun of anti-vaxxers, asking ourselves “how could they possibly be so stupid to think they shouldn’t get vaccines?”.
I went back to school in 2015 to become a nurse practitioner and halfway through was my pediatrics course…we learned about the vaccine schedule, we watched a pro-vax video (a mother was crying talking about how she didn’t give her baby the whooping cough vaccine and she was so sick for so long, etc…that type of video) and then, here’s the interesting part…the professor spent about an hour talking about how Dr. Andy Wakefield is a fraud, how vaccines are safe, even what to say and do if parents don’t want to vaccinate. We did NOT learn about side effects, we did NOT learn about the VAERS system or how to report a vaccine injury…heck, why would we because we were taught that there are no injuries from vaccines.
Even though I still had my blinders on during this class (and oh man how I WISH i knew then what I know now…I would have politely and articulately dismantled everything that professor said), I remember thinking it was odd that she spent so much time talking about Andy Wakefield.
OK…so now not only do I have my years experience growing up with my dad’s advice, I now have learned all about vaccines from grad school and then “THE” conversation happens…a dear friend of mine, whose children are 12 and 10, for some reason brought up the fact that when her 12 year old was a baby, she delayed his vaccines…I immediately start with “Oh my goodness! WHY would you have done that? Don’t you know that all you were doing is increasing his chances of obtaining a deadly disease?” And she said that she couldn’t remember all of the details it was so long ago, but that she and her husband spent a lot of time researching what little info there was available back then.
SOOO…I could try to paint myself in a positive light and say that because I respected my friend, I researched what she said because I thought she might be right. WRONG! I was basically being a huge jerk and thought “Ok, well I’m just going to prove her wrong…I’m going to find research that proves my point and then i will SHOW HER”…So the research began…”