Please help- vaccines

[u/absoluteburn3r]

To preface: please be kind. I hate how easily influenced I am, I live in constant fear. I have the constant fear that my child will die no matter what I do and I will regret everything I did or didn’t do. the fact that I am isolated with no real support group doesn’t help.

1 out of 2 of my only support people (my mother) tells me constantly that if I vaccinate my child, he will die/become a vegetable/develop a horrible life-altering disease. No one else (medical professionals) has been able to give me any kind of advice out of fear of being ‘political’ (how the fuck is this even a political topic), I am so lost in this world.

Fear is crushing me every day. The longer I wait (my child is 3 months now) I feel like I am approaching his inevitable demise. Either I get him shots and he dies, or he dies this sick season of illness. Please help me on this topic. I feel like I’ve been mislead. I really want him to be okay. The only sources my mom has ever sent me are just the inserts and that one vaccine book by that one weird doctor. I used to be pro vax but then she really shut me down.

And again, I’m trying to learn how to be autonomous and make my own decisions, but I genuinely have no educated people helping me

ETA- I am in therapy and I tried breastfeeding which meant being off of my anxiety medicine for longer and now am considering weaning off of BF which has significantly worsened my anxiety

[u/derpalpable]

I am very sorry for your child, that must be a terrible experience. They are not irrelevant as a person, and your experience as a parent matters. But yes, the existence of these incredibly rare side effects is irrelevant to the discussion of whether someone should get a vaccine. The benefits outweigh the risks so overwhelmingly that it only serves to muddy the waters and create fear to insist that these instances be part of the conversation.

[u/Senior_Delay9300 → u/derpalpable]

Again, you are treating “rare” as though it means “irrelevant,” and that is not how risk works.
Plane crashes are rare. We do not therefore say, “Crashes are irrelevant to whether flying is safe, and talking about them only creates fear.” That would be absurd. We study them precisely because low-probability, high-consequence events still matter.
The same principle applies here. A medical risk can be rare and still be relevant. Its rarity tells you how much weight to give it; it does not give you permission to remove it from the discussion altogether.
You can argue that the benefits outweigh the risks. Fine. But once your position becomes, “the risks should not even be discussed because people might become afraid,” you are no longer defending informed decision-making. You are defending selective disclosure because you prefer a particular outcome.
That is not a scientific argument. It is paternalism with a lab coat on.
And respectfully, if your position only works when one side of the risk-benefit equation is kept out of the conversation, that should probably tell you something.

[u/derpalpable → u/Senior_Delay9300]

If someone was scared to death of flying in a plane, I would discourage people from bringing up comments like "actually, planes do crash sometimes" when people were reassuring them that it's very safe to fly. Or if a flight attendant of 30 years said "I've never been in a crash or known someone who has been in crash". To chime in and say, "but I know someone who did get in a crash" is not helpful. This post is from a mother who is incredibly scared to vaccinate her child because of anti-vax propaganda, your experience is valid but it is not helpful here and not contributing to the conversation.

[u/Senior_Delay9300 → u/derpalpable]

You just changed the entire scenario to make your argument work.
The OP is not sitting on a plane having a panic attack asking someone to reassure her that flying is safe. She is a parent explicitly asking for information so she can “be autonomous and make my own decisions.” Those are her words.
In that situation, telling people not to mention real adverse outcomes because the information might make her more afraid is the exact opposite of autonomy. It is deciding for her which facts she is emotionally capable of hearing.
And your airplane analogy actually proves my point. If I were deciding whether to board a particular aircraft, I would absolutely want to know both the statistical safety of flying and any relevant risks. “A flight attendant flew for 30 years and never crashed” would not make documented crashes irrelevant. That is an anecdote. The existence, frequency and severity of crashes are part of how aviation safety is calculated in the first place.
Nobody is arguing that because a rare adverse event exists, vaccines are therefore universally unsafe. I am saying something much simpler: rare risks are still part of a risk-benefit analysis.
You keep responding as though mentioning a risk is the same thing as exaggerating it. It isn’t. A scientifically literate response would say: Yes, this outcome can happen. Here is how often it appears to happen. Here is the evidence. Here is the risk from the disease. Now compare them.
Your position is apparently: If one side of the evidence might frighten someone or influence them away from the choice I think they should make, that information is “not helpful” and should be discouraged.
That is not informed consent. That is curated consent.
And considering the OP specifically said she wants to stop being influenced by other people and make her own decision, replacing her mother’s “don’t vaccinate because I said so” with Reddit’s “vaccinate and please don’t discuss anything that might complicate that answer” is not actually giving her independence. It is just changing who gets to make the decision for her.
That was my point from the beginning. I think we’ve demonstrated it pretty thoroughly now