Recently the New York Post ran a guest column by a mother of three that confirmed everything I’ve written about anti-vaccination hysteria. For those who wish to catch up on the controversy, simply click here, here, and here.
First of all she is college-educated and from a “crunchy family,” which is half the anti-vaccination alliance of eggheads and hillbillies.
Second, she fell for the bogus “scientific study” that linked measles, mumps, and rubella shots to autism.
Finally, she used the “religious exemption” scam to avoid vaccinating one of her school-age daughters even though she admits, “that wasn’t the real reason.”
Why did mom think she could get away with exposing her children to the risk of disease?
Easy, she depended on other mothers to be responsible, “I just thought: “Let someone else take on the risks of vaccinating. It was a very selfish viewpoint because I had the best of both worlds. I knew that my daughters had a low risk of contracting vaccine-preventable diseases — precisely because vaccination is effective. I had faith in herd immunity while questioning its very existence.”
Then Kristen O’Meara’s daughters got sick.
Her twins Áine and Lena and her older daughter, Natasha were suffering from “rotavirus, the potentially deadly form of diarrhea that could so easily have been prevented if I’d gotten them vaccinated.”
Symptoms included intense pain and diarrhea that lasted for three weeks.
You might say Kristen was scared straight.
If the girls had been newborns, she might have lost them all. Fortunately her girls recovered and mom regained her sanity.
She started doing research into the effectiveness and safety of vaccines and discovered that over the years she’d been fed a load of Kool-Aid. In June of 2015, she took her girls to a new pediatrician and they began “an aggressive catch-up schedule” for vaccination.
Now all three girls, just like the dogs you adopt at a shelter, have had their shots.
But even better for other mothers misled by anti-vaccination propaganda, Kristen has gone public with her evolution from anti fanatic to pro advocate. She wants to spare other parents the agony she went through when her girls were sick.
She’s given the advocacy group Voices for Vaccines permission to tell her story and she recommends parents read a book called “The Panic Virus” to get all the relevant facts.
Kristen does have one regret related to her decision to vaccinate her girls. “I lost my best friend over the issue," she explains.
But she didn’t lose her daughters.
Michael Reagan, the eldest son of President Reagan, is a Newsmax TV analyst. A syndicated columnist and author, he chairs The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Michael is an in-demand speaker with Premiere speaker’s bureau. Read more reports from Michael Reagan — Go Here Now.