Some are stupid. Some are merely misinformed or selfish.
We delayed my daughter's vaccination, because her mother objected for reasons that were never quite clear. It has to do with Mama's family, but even that is a confusing mess.
I have a good doctor, who was my child's doctor, too. Mama objects, I give a look across the office, Doc looks back at me with a half a shadow of a shrug:
Good with me, don't worry.
And then one day Mama didn't make it to the doctor's appointment. With nobody present in person to object, of coursre I signed off on vaccinations. Mama threw a fit and then dropped it.
Some years later, I heard from her parents that they never did understand why I tried to stop my daughter from being vaccinated. Like I said, it's complicated.
I don't know if Mama thought her parents were antivax; she was ostensibly opposed to her parents except when she wanted to borrow some weird principle for an identity politic. And, you know, antivax was a sparkling little bauble; she was raised in a Christian sect known paradoxically for the number of progeny who go into either medical professional or medical skeptical fields. And I think what happened is that Gran'ma and Gran'pa discovered that the naturopath in the congregation, the great doctor who will tell you how a fruit-based antioxidant-boosting diet will protect you from Ebola virus, got his kids their damn shots.
(Every N.D. I have ever known has been at least a little bit bizarre, and generally kind of annoying, to boot, but none abandoned reality entirely, and when anyone with the least bit of medical training and comprehension looks at the epidemiology in our area, antivax isn't so much a statement of keeping our kids healthy but, rather, a declaration that we intend for them to be sick, such that a parent who is remotely a medical professional with a shred of medical professionalism remaining will look at what's happening in our unvaccinated clusters and make the healthy decision.)
But antivax reared its head again as my daughter grew; Mama turned out and turned up for a doctor's appointment when our daughter was eleven in order to forestall HPV vaccination.
And they knew. They knew I would show a certain amount of respect to the parental purview of my daughter's mother. And the thing is that we all have a lot of other stuff to worry about with her than antivax.
But it didn't help when my daughter experienced a potential side effect event the day after seeing the doctor when she was twelve. Well, it wouldn't have mattered at all except this was during their week at a time when we were still trading custody.
But I also had a weird "mockingbird" moment while everyone was pitching a fit because when the kid hit the deck and twitched, they all just stood around and stared; if it was as scary and awful and
prolonged an event as they describe, why the hell did nobody do anything, like make sure she's not swallowing her tongue, or, you know, call an ambulance. And though Mama has some personal problems right now, and despite our tempestuous, fraught relationship, we still have our functioning customs. Mama and I had a discussion among ourselves that involved all of a couple lines of speech and then our couples version of a "dude" argument, involving exasperated looks, shrugs, and other gestures.
Hell, our daughter knows the score. She might have shown the typical adolescent embarrassment and disgust at the proposition of her sexual activity ("But why condone premarital sex," Gran'pa wonders, "with a vaccine that says, 'Oh, hey! It's safe to be sinful!'") but can only laugh at the prospect that her grandparents forget Gran'pa's obsession with the fact that sexual predators exist ("And I worked in a prison," he explains with nearly petulant satisfaction, "so I know!")
What is really striking for being someone actually in the middle of it is that much of the family's problems apparently derive from a combination of Christian masculinity, disciplinary head of household fancies, and purity cult within ownership society, all mixed and then hit by an exponent describing "short-man syndrome". That is to say, most of it was driven by a bizarre need to express oneself according to an oppositional identity. Gran'pa is the type of guy you only need to talk to for a short while before he starts repeating his cycles and, depending on the circumstance, contradicting himself. He's one of those terrible perpetual bullshitters who likes to call himself "Silver Fox" and remind everyone how smart he is.
But watching this crew, and especially him, shift on this, has been strange. In the end, even though we weren't slating doctor visits covertly, or anything, I was pretty much left to get my daughter vaccinated. The HPV vaccine, for instance, came in three stages. Despite all the hullaballoo after it became clear she was getting the shots, nobody moved to stop me. Mama, for her own reasons, skipped out on the subsequent doctor visits when she could have spoken up and disrupted the process.
That is to say, it was worth it to try to raise hell, but not to actually exercise parental prerogative and stop me.
I'm uncertain where this experience falls on the spectrum of antivax ideology and practice, but what stands out to me is that it hasn't been about a discredited study pretty much since the first time, years ago, I found myself saying, "Yeah, but that was discredited and withdrawn, you know." That is, I haven't had to say it to them again, and now they're all trying to blame other people for their own beliefs and actions―I mean, literally, claiming it was other people, and not them. And in the end, it would seem that for these people, antivax was only ever a greedy self-empowerment scheme born of a particular family ethic so stubborn you can actually find someone willing to literally argue that two plus two must equal five because it's elitist and offensive to require that it can only equal four. So, right; I don't know where they are on the antivax spectrum, but comparatively, I keep waiting for antivax to transcend the basic generalization that they place their children at risk for the sake of their own personal pride, and that part, at least, is consistent.
Comparatively, where I clock in on vaccine conscience is like the one year when we had a flu vaccine that was for the prior season's strain, between seventeen and thirty-five percent effective, and recommended for other demographic groups but not mine. Doc says, "Flu vaccine?" I say, "Do I need it?" Doc shrugs and we go on. Doc says, "Flu vaccine?" I say, "I'm working the school this year." He gives me the vaccine. It's not even a matter of conscience to me; seventeen to thirty-five percent? Yeah, you know, if, like my mother, I was in an age group recommended for the vaccine, and was
taking children to Mexico during a time when there is a travel advisory about the flu, I would get the goddamn shot. If I'm headed back to the classroom, I'll get the damn shot. But in any normal year, if the professional recommendation does not include me in the demographics, I'm not getting a flu vaccine just because. I'll get that shot for other people, but, no, if I'm not elevating my risk profile or prophylactic necessity, I'm probably not getting a flu shot. And anyone who asks my opinion about anyone else's objection will hear that standard; if one is outside the recommendation and not elevating their risk profile, you're not going to hear me complain.
And, certainly, there will be some who say I'm cavalier, but in my lifetime, as the need for annual flu vaccination has increased, it's been something of a sideshow. And you don't even have to transfer one incident out to everything else; it's just that after so many years of hearing people say
anything, even contradicting themselves from one sentence to the next, it really does sound like abject consumerism. And the whole time, when the question arises, it's easy enough to do what I thought everyone under the sun is supposed to know:
I asked my doctor, and he said ... er ... actually, he just shrugs.
And that's how it goes with us;
if Mama had pushed too far in her antivax, I would have looked at Doc and he would have done something else, and we would have just covertly scheduled another visit for when Mama wasn't around. He might let me see him rolling his eyes as Mama recites the bit about letting baby's immune system get stronger before vaccinating, but the kid wasn't daycaring, and if he really wanted me to start, we would have started.
If I absolutely need my flu vaccine, he won't bother asking. I have a good doctor who I trust. And, you know, for all we're told to ask our doctor, I just don't see why we wouldn't. Even if my reasons are stupid―seriously, it looked and sounded and felt like zombie-eyed consumerism for the longest time―he'll accommodate if reality allows. Do I need my flu vaccine, this year? He looks at my age, the updated charts, my household profile, double checks my travel and work plans, and most years just shrugs. And he already knows, if he thinks I really, really, really need a flu vaccine this year, he won't bother asking, because I have a good doctor who knows his patient trusts his medical assessment.
[Particularly on a science forum]
