Roald Dahl is the author of many of our favorite childhood stories including "James and The Giant Peach" and "Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory." What you might not know is that both of these novels, Dahl dedicated to his daughter who passed away at seven due to Measles.
In 1986, Dahl wrote a piece nearly 24 years after his daughter's death and explained that parents then and today are gifted with something he was not—the choice to protect their children from diseases via vaccine. His writing was analyzed once more during the 2015 Measles outbreak in California. The reason this particular outbreak is so important is that it occurred nearly 15 years after the United States had deemed the disease eradicated. This is a prime example of how easy it is for diseases to resurface when parents choose not to vaccinate their children.
An important factor to consider when contemplating immunizations for a child is not only their safety but the safety of everyone they come in contact with. There are some children who physically cannot receive vaccines due to infancy or medical exemptions like allergies or immune disorders. For these children's health, it is crucial that we do our civic duty in vaccinating our own children. This is not a matter of parenting styles but of life and death.
I believe the most popular cause of this new anti-vax movement is the circulation of misinformation. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published a paper in a British Medical Journal that stated combination vaccinations are the direct cause of Autism. Modern day parents got a hold of this information and ran with it, thus starting the anti-vaccine movement. What parents failed to recognize is that Wakefield's paper was ejected from the journal and he was de-licensed because his so-called study only included eight children with Autism and he manipulated said findings. So, the entire premise of not vaccinating your children derives from information that isn't even true! By not vaccinating their children in fear of Autism, parents are promoting the idea that it is better to take the risk of fatal diseases than hypothetically have a child with a disability.
In order to combat this surge of anti-vax parents, we must provide the public with the right information. Instead of ignoring the misinformation that is cycling through the media, we have to challenge it. We must challenge it by offering the right resources that prove the importance of vaccines and further discredit the fallacies that people are relying on. It isn't about what kind of parent you are; it is about public health and stopping the disregard for the lives of people with disabilities such as Autism.
In conclusion, I will leave you with this final thought. Roald Dahl, a man who lost his own daughter to a disease and lived long enough to see that same disease be preventable by the discovery of vaccinations once said, "it really is almost a crime to allow your child to go unimmunized."
