No vaccines? No school! – San Francisco students, get your booster shots!

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San Francisco schools are going to send some kids home next week if they don’t get their pertussis booster.

It’s not a surprise that California is concerned with pertussis. The reduction in vaccination rates have caused this deadly disease, also known as whooping cough, to make a come back, infecting individuals across the board.

San Francisco schools have been calling families whose middle school and high school students have yet to receive the booster shot TDaP which helps protect against Tetanus, Diphtheria, and Pertussis.  Despite these numerous phone calls, about 2,000 students have failed to get their boosters and will not be admitted back to school next week.

I was shocked to receive several phone calls from my son’s elementary school this year reminding parents that students who do not have their shots up-to-date or do not have an acceptable waiver will not be admitted into school.  I also received a separate phone call stating that my child was missing shots from the last record given to their office and that he must have this vaccine before school started.

These days, vaccines are a major question mark and a very serious and emotional issue among parents, school officials, doctors and nurses.  There are whole organizations dedicated to vaccine research, and vaccination coverage is at an all time low.  It should’ve been no surprise that parents are receiving such reminder phone calls from schools as a result of this lack of vaccination, but I was still taken aback.

Vaccines were an unquestioned reality when I was a child.  Every child got his or her shots on schedule, without question, unless there was a medical reason to avoid them entirely or delay them.  However, with recent frightening reports of children being damaged by vaccinations, many parents have chosen not to vaccinate their children or opt out of specific vaccines because of ingredients they find questionable.

I’m not that far outside of California, so when I learned that there was an outbreak of pertussis last year, I was frightened.  I was once sucked into the vaccination debate when our oldest son, at the age of 2, suddenly regressed in his development and remained delayed for some time.  Before I knew it, I was filling out autism questionnaires and welcoming a speech therapist into my home on a weekly basis, and taking my child to audiologists and neurologists.  At this very same time, our youngest had just been born and wasn’t receiving any vaccinations, because we were afraid.

We were afraid that our decision to fully vaccinate our oldest child had given him autism. We researched as much as we could, but everything we read just frightened us. We were too afraid to make a decision one way or the other.  We just kept putting off the decision as we continued to research, looking for that specific aha moment that would make or break the argument.

Caricature of frightened people receiving the smallpox vaccine. People during that time were afraid they would turn into cows if they received the vaccine.

There was no such aha moment, at least, not for a long while.  After a great deal of research, we chose to hold off on vaccinating our youngest until he turned 2.  This could’ve proven fatal, except that we got lucky.

Our youngest was diagnosed with asthma around age 2-3.  At this point, we were in a rush to get him caught up on his DTaP (Diphtheria, Tetanus and Acellular Pertussis) because, as I stated above, pertussis made a comeback.  Whooping cough is nasty business for a healthy person.  For someone with asthma, it could easily be a death sentence.

Thankfully, in our community, there was no pertussis outbreak.  We were able to fully vaccinate our son against whooping cough without any issues.  No adverse reactions came of it, and no one has autism.

Did you read that right?  Our oldest son was never diagnosed with autism. Despite the efforts of many medical “experts” to give him some kind of diagnosis, we, as his parents, knew better.  He was delayed, for another reason, and I’ll go into that in another post, but now he’s all caught up and thriving.  He went to a regular public kindergarten and was above average, is in a regular public 1st grade class, and is fascinated by astronomy, paleontology, and insects.  He’s a regular science nerd and reads very well.

Our youngest blows me away too.  No issues there at all.  No mental retardation.  No autism or neurological disorders of any kind.  He’s doing very well.  I’m grateful, whenever I hear a vaccine debate, that I figured it out and got him vaccinated against horrible diseases and viruses that can seriously endanger the life of individuals of all ages when they suffer from asthma…

…after all, he got pneumonia from a simple and relatively harmless chest cold and was in the emergency room as a result.  If he gets that sick from the common cold, one that the rest of the family caught and didn’t get nearly as ill with, I don’t want to think of what would happen to him if he caught whooping cough, swine flu or influenza.

I’m grateful, thanks to vaccinations, that I can protect my asthmatic child from such deadly diseases and viruses as these, and I encourage other parents to do so as well.  I’ve done the research, and I was anti-vax for a few years.  Not anymore.  I trust and believe in vaccines. Vaccines save lives.

I will do a series of posts, complete with research, supporting my decision to vaccinate my children using evidence based scientific data.

I hope you’ll comment below and share your story with vaccinations and the diseases they are meant to prevent.  Come back again soon to read more about my experience with vaccines and the research I’ve done.

Question:  Has your child ever become sick with a vaccine preventable illness?  If so, please share your story.

Related articles

• Zero hour for school whooping cough shots (sfgate.com)
• SF Students Barred for Not Having Whooping Cough Vaccinations (sfist.com)
• Calif. Schools Turn Away Unvaccinated Students (abcnews.go.com)