Flu shot success!

I did get my rock-star mommyness on; I got A an appointment at his doctor's for a seasonal flu shot (independent of the H1N1 vaccine), and he got it today.

He took it like a champ. The doctor's office was backed up with people getting flu shots. Crazy. But he got his injectable vaccine and I got his vaccination record updated and we're all set on seasonal flu vaccines in our household.

Next stop: H1N1 vaccines.

There's a lot of crazy out there on the tubes, as we like to call the Internet around here in honor of the former senator from Alaska, namely in the anti-vaccine movement.

Repeat after me: correlation does not equal causation. Equating correlation with causation in lieu of scientific evidence is how superstitions get started.

I'm not as hard-core about the H1N1, but the anti-vaccine rhetoric for all the standard bad diseases drives me batty. I know how long doctors went to school and that as many hours as I spend watching House, I am not a doctor. So if my doctor recommends something and the CDC, the WHO, and everyone with a medical degree under the sun seems to back her up, then yeah, vaccines are super.

I wouldn't mind it if the anti-vaccine people were only hurting themselves (I'm not so keen on them hurting their own kids, but I'm willing to take that as Darwin at work). But when someone else decides that their kid should experience the measles instead of getting the MMR vaccine because the MMR vaccine "causes" autism, they've become a public health risk to my family. Measles is communicable by air; you can get it by being in the same place an infected person was within the last two hours.

If this seems like a far-out situation, there was a measles outbreak here last year where there were contagious people in my local Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. Eleven kids got it, some of them infants who needed to be hospitalized. Some seventy kids in total ended up being quarantined, either because their parents chose not to vaccinate them or they were too young to be vaccinated. I imagine it's super fun to be stuck in your house with a kid for two weeks.

So when you're Googling vaccines to "educate" yourself, take a minute and Google the pre-vaccination mortality rates of those diseases. Google the side effects of the vaccines, and then Google the effects of the diseases.

Then the next time you see a cute little three-month-old shopping with his or her parents in Trader Joe's, think about giving those diseases to that baby, because by not vaccinating your kid, you've made a choice to give that baby that disease too.