Fairfax-owned “Essential Baby” has a typically lightweight piece on the topic of immunisation. The bottom line:
The way I look at vaccination is: there is a tiny risk of an adverse reaction, compared to a much, much bigger risk of my children contracting a host of diseases if I had chosen not to vaccinate them. I’m willing to take the smaller risk.
Kudos for being in favour of immunisation, but this is not the reason why parents should immunise. The reason parents should immunise is two-fold.
1) most anti-immunisation information is based on faulty science. For instance, the original finding that MMR shots caused autism has since been found to be wrong. Science sometimes throws up incorrect findings, it’s called a Type I error. Scientists are pretty good at shrugging, tearing up the findings, and moving on. Unfortunately these things tend to linger in the public’s imagination long after the scientists have realised the error.
2) It’s not about “the risk to my child of immunising versus not immunising.” There’s something called the free rider problem. Think about it this way. If everyone paid taxes but you, that would be great because the government would have lots of revenue, but you would not be out of pocket. But if many people stop paying taxes – they become free riders – and the system breaks down.
For a hunter-gatherer tribe, if everyone goes hunting and gathering except one person who stays back at camp, then the free rider has it good, and the tribe survives. But if there are lots of free riders, then the tribe will starve.
With immunisation, if everyone gets immunised except one person, the “tribe” (in this case society) has a group resistance. The disease can’t travel from person to person easily, because most people are immunised. Epidemics won’t get traction, so even if there is one person in the middle who is not immune, they will probably never catch the disease. But once lots of people stop getting immunised, the group immunity breaks down, and everyone is at greater risk. Epidemics have a chance to get a foothold in some non-immune individuals and then spread rapidly through the population.
Even people who are immunised still have a chance of catching the disease, although the chance is much lower. So an epidemic will endanger everyone. Free riders endanger those who are immunised as well as themselves.
So… that’s why immunisation is important. Not because “this option is kinda better than that option for my child.”
Making the right decision based on faulty logic isn’t commendable, especially for a Fairfax journalist.