A Repentant Anti-Vaxxer

I used to be an anti-vaxxer.

I grew up in an anti-establishment, outsider milieu.

Some of it was based in fundamentalist Christian beliefs which did not align with the wider community; some of it was a hangover from the counterculture of the 60s and 70s.

My personal route to strict anti-vaccination was complex, but it resulted in my children being completely unvaccinated until the youngest was nine years old.

At that point, my fear and ignorance and the misinformation that had swirled in my mind for years had been overcome bit by bit.

Just as the journey into anti-vaccination had been long and winding, the journey out was, too.

One of the things that struck at the edifice of my anti-vax beliefs was finding out how low the percentage of unvaccinated children in my country was.

I had unfortunately fallen unknowingly into a den of rabid anti-vaxxers at a vulnerable time in my life. Lacking support from sober-minded, well-informed women, I had clutched at the support these women offered me. I was too young and naïve to know how extreme their views were. I did realise that they were out of step with official government-sanctioned advice, but my upbringing meant that that wasn’t a dealbreaker.

The triumphant, arrogant tone these women adopted made me believe for an embarrassingly long time that “our” cause was winning. I believed that more and more parents were “seeing the truth” and that, in some ill-defined way, we would one day triumph.

When I bumped into a statistic showing that the vast majority of the children in my country were vaccinated, for some reason it was a body blow to my enthusiasm.

One of my less noble but still real motivations for getting my children vaccinated was imagining myself in a situation where they were seriously ill, possibly hospitalised, with a disease they could have been vaccinated against. The thought of the anger and disapproval of others over my negligence - even though negligence was never my intention - was frightening.

In truth, my core motivation had always been to protect my children and to do what was best for them. Believing, as I had for most of my life, that authority figures could not be trusted and that conspiracies and cover-ups were all around us, government-sponsored advice and medical care were always suspect.

Today, I can’t remember all the events and epiphanies that exposed the weaknesses and outright lies of the anti-vax movement.

I am forever grateful that my children did not catch any diseases covered by the childhood vaccination schedule, and that I was able to catch them up with the full complement of vaccines with the help of our family doctor.

I understand the anger that some people have towards even reformed anti-vaxxers. I realise that their anger is motivated by care for vulnerable people and by frustration at what seems like the invincible stupidity of the anti-vax movement.

However, when I was still in that movement but had begun to have serious doubts about its claims, the kindness of some pro-vaccine people, their insistence that changing one’s mind was always a possibility and that “forgiveness” was available made acting according to what I had come to see was the truth easier.

I would have acted regardless, but I’m still grateful for the hope they offered.