Vaccination - It SAVES Lifes - Get Vacced TODAY!

A 51% exemption rate implies that only 49% of the children at the Waldorf School of San Diego are vaccinated, far below a rate that even has a prayer of maintaining herd immunity.

Of course, anti-vaccine parents both demonize and have unrealistic ideas about what vaccines can do, which is part of the problem. They demonize vaccines as the cause of autism, autoimmune disease, and asthma, along with all sorts of other health problems, even though there is no scientifically credible evidence linking vaccines to autism or any of the other conditions attributed to vaccines. Yet, at the same time, they justify their refusal with the implicit belief that vaccines are 100% effective. I refer to this as an "implicit" belief because a frequent argument made by anti-vaccine parents when it is pointed out to them that they are endangering other children is that those other children are vaccinated; so how could their precious baby ever be a threat to other children? The reason, of course, is that no vaccine is 100% effective. Some, like the MMR vaccine, are "only" around 90% effective. Now, in medicine, 90% effectiveness is in general excellent, about as high as one can expect from any intervention. It's not 100%, though. Worse, pockets of unvaccinated children provide a repository for vaccine-preventable disease that can infect other unvaccinated children, as well as vaccinated children who, for whatever reason, did not develop effective immunity due to their vaccination.

Failure to vaccinate also endangers the unvaccinated children as well. Last year, in fact, this risk was quantified in a study that found that unvaccinated children have a 23-fold elevated risk of catching pertussis compared with vaccinated children. Given how nasty and contagious pertussis is and how safe the vaccine is, there really is no good reason not to vaccinate at least against pertussis.