It’s not their vaccinated kids they’re worried about.
It’s their baby at home, who hasn’t had the full complement of shots yet because they’re too little to have had them all (some shots are only meant for kids over a certain age), but who’ll still be exposed to the disease just the same if they interact with their big brother or big sister’s classmates on a play date, or even if the older kid who WAS vaccinated interacts with the unvaccinated kids and brings whatever germs they’re carrying home on his clothes or hands or toys. It’s possible to transport germs without coming down with a noticeable case of the disease yourself.
If this baby goes to the doctor for a standard checkup and there’s an unvaccinated kid (who may not even know they’re sick yet, diseases take time to show clear symptoms and for many of them you can still be contagious even if you’re asymptomatic) with as yet undiagnosed whooping cough or measles in the waiting room, if they go to the shops with Mummy or Daddy to pick up a pack of toilet paper and some milk and there’s someone who wasn’t vaccinated against the flu that year, got sick and hasn’t realised they’re contagious yet…there might be a problem there, huh?
There are people who legit CAN’T be protected by vaccinations as well. Not because their parents don’t want them to be, not because they’ve got some religious objection. They’re sick - for example, they might have cancer or be an organ donation recipient or be on certain medications - and have such cruddy immune systems as a result that they’re too vulnerable to risk even tiny exposure. Go play with your friends, Timmy, and then we can go visit Granny who‘s between two rounds of chemotherapy and must not under any circumstances get sick. Better hope Timmy’s friends are all vaccinated and won’t leave him carrying flu germs on his clothes after he leaves them, or Granny’s in real trouble.
(This was a thing for my family when I was little. There’s a letter that my dad wrote to my kindergarten teacher, saying “please confirm all the kids in baby!Alamut’s class are up to date with their shots? I know it’s intrusive, but my wife/Alamut’s mother is undergoing cancer treatment…if baby!Alamut brings some bug home, even a cold, my wife WILL get it and her immune system is so fucked at present that she couldn’t fight her way out of a wet paper bag. Please do this for me.”)
They may be looking at the big picture, rather than their own individual kids. Do you know how herd immunity works?
Herd immunity works by reducing the size of the pool for possible carriers of a given disease - if there are twenty people, and fifteen of them are vaccinated and protected, then only five of the twenty will be at risk of getting a full-on dose of that illness, and only those five will be able to be potential carriers to spread it to other people through coughing/sneezing on them or however else that disease spreads. The smaller a potential pool of carriers is, the less likely it is that any given person OUTSIDE that pool will develop the disease through contact with one of those carriers. If you never interact with anyone who has measles, you’re not particularly likely to get measles yourself, right? It’s POSSIBLE, maybe, but it’s not very likely that you’ll spontaneously come down with a horrible plague without having that contact and interaction somewhere along the way.
Anyway, there’s a certain threshold that has to be reached for herd immunity to work. It varies by disease, but it’s usually somewhere between 85 and 95 percent. If 95 percent of a given population is vaccinated against a disease (everyone who can be, basically) then the small minority of people who can’t be vaccinated (too young, too old, too sick already, whatever the reason is) are safe from that disease by default just because they so rarely meet anyone who’s carrying it. They avoid being exposed just because there’s no one in their life who could expose them.
If people who COULD be vaccinated decide not to and go “lol no, I’m not into that”, then they increase the risk for everyone around them who can’t be…and once the percentage of people with immunity drops below that threshold, the herd immunity that protects all the most vulnerable people stops working altogether. If there are enough carriers to keep passing the germs around - and there really don’t have to be very many - then you can’t avoid being exposed. If you leave the house, you’ll meet SOMEONE who can pass it on.
It’s not the vaccinated kid they’re concerned about. It’s everyone else.
janainaart
jacobvanloon
germansingergirl
origamiaround
dailybridgerton
