I was an anti-vax crackpot

Alternatively entitled: how a bout of the poops changed my entire belief system.

{This article is a helpful literal interpretation of the NY Post piece that ran yesterday. Read it with a grain of aluminum salt.}

Editor’s note: A new study from the AAP– an agency that has endorsed eradicating all religious and personal belief vaccine exemptions, and encourages pediatricians to kick unvaccinated patients out of their practices– reveals that pediatricians who have encountered at least one unvaccinated child in their careers has risen from 74.5% to 87% between 2006 and 2013. Why it took three years to publish a survey is not mentioned, nor is the reason why 13% of pediatricians have never in their entire careers met one single unvaccinated child in this epidemic of unvaccination. For once, better detection methods are not blamed for a rise. 

Mother Kristy O’Leary explains why she was staunchly anti-vax until she had a frightening wake-up call. In her own words:

My three-year old daughter screamed out in agonizing pain as her stomach cramped, dehydrated and pooping around the clock. Yes, that’s right. She had rotavirus, a kind of diarrhea that is potentially deadly in third world countries where Nestle has convinced new mothers that it is better to sacrifice all else in their lives in order to afford to buy Nestle’s baby formula and mix it with bacteria and virus-infected water than to feed their infants milk from their own breasts.

Granted, rotavirus isn’t a deadly disease in America where I live, but I’ve always had a flair for drama.

Despite the fact that the CDC estimates that by my daughter’s age, almost all children– vaccinated or not– have had rotavirus, having witnessed a bad case of the runs in my own child, I am now of the belief that this magical vaccine would have prevented my daughter’s infection entirely. And I know that the silly scientists at the CDC say that a rotavirus infection only lasts three to eight days, but my daughter had it for 21 straight days!  That’s how susceptible she was.

Anyway, the guilt was overwhelming, but I thanked my lucky stars that my daughter was not a medically fragile, starving African baby drinking fecal-matter infested water– exactly the kind of child that rotavirus can snatch from this world in a heartbeat.

Then came the kicker: my husband and I both got the horrible rota ourselves. Yes, I realize this is a statistical impossibility since we should both be immune from toddlerhood infection of the common strains, but that’s what happened. We had a bad case of the baby poops at 40 years old, and that’s what made me finally see the error of my anti-vax ways.

I’m smart, educated, and was raised in a crunchy family that questioned authority. It was only natural that my haughtiness led me to being anti-vaccine. Nothing says “admired pillar of the community” like announcing to the neighborhood that you don’t vaccinate for pertussis. I was truly superior to the vaccinators, as everyone knows all anti-vaxers are, and I was treated as such. Never once did I feel marginalized as taking the advice of a Playboy bunny.

I was a special anti-vaxer, because while I did not believe that vaccines were safe or effective, I truly believed in the theory of herd immunity, and laughed myself to sleep at night thinking of how everyone else in the world absorbed the risks of vaccinating, and my child was taking advantage of it.

Thankfully, in the end, our entire family pulled through this terrible case of the poops with cutting edge medical advice: rest and rehydration.

Then, after the non-deadly Disneyland measles epidemic that infected 0.0004% of the population of California, I started reading books by the rotavirus vaccine inventor Paul Offit and taking the advice of loony tunes Seth Mnookin.

Straightaway I took my daughter to her vaccine-friendly pediatrician and demanded that she be “caught up” on all vaccines on a schedule that was overly aggressive even for a pediatrician. Yes, it was really that easy. Just overnight my entire belief system went out the window once I had a bad case of the poops. I even tried to get a poop vaccine for myself, but it turns out they won’t administer it to anyone over the age of eight months. I wonder why that is?

I was shocked when I lost some of my anti-vax friends over my reckless actions with my child; it’s almost as if they think I went off the deep end or something. But, if my story of having to poop real bad changes the mind of even one anti-vaxer, it’s worth embarrassing myself with all of the inaccurate information I have shared here.

Sincerely,

Kristy O’Leary

{For the satire-impaired, this article is a joke, written in response to an article that was not a joke. The link to the original piece is in blue, at the top.}