Whoops! You blink and two months have gone past, and the only real evidence of it is that the baby now seems impossibly long. Where did these legs come from?

I feel like a broken record on the topic which has prompted me to post today, but a golden rule of communications (my day job) is that by the time you’re sick of saying something, someone else is only hearing it for the first time.

So: please, please vaccinate your babies.

In our wonderful antenatal classes the message was very simple: we vaccinate our children against the things we don’t want them to get. I don’t want my baby to get measles, or whooping cough, or polio or HPV. I don’t want anyone else’s baby to get them either. And vaccination is how we make our babies, and everyone else’s babies, safer.

A month ago we did baby’s 15-month jabs, and due to her heart condition, she had to get a full four – one in each delicious little arm and leg. And she was very not happy about this situation, and there were tears and crying and declaring one parent (her father) to be the cruellest villain in all human recollection and the other (moi) to be the second-cruellest for not stopping him.

But it was 100% worth it to know she has protection against diseases that could kill her.

There is so much disinformation out there about vaccinations – and I say “disinformation” not “misinformation” because it’s absolutely, deliberately misleading. A lot of it is focused around the COVID vaccines, but it’s clearly bled into other areas, as this story on Newsroom illustrates. The impact of the anti-vaccine movement is literally counted in lives, and this was particularly underscored for me by learning this week that goddamn polio is back in New York.

Never one to miss a chance to quote Hannah Gadsby (and lament that there isn’t a handily embeddable video of this quote, come on, internet!):

“As difficult as this life is, it’s nice to have a life. And it’s particularly nice to have this life in a world without…

POLIO.

Polio is bad, and that is a fact, not a feeling.”

I know a lot of people who are declining or delaying vaccinations aren’t vicious, or gullible, or too deep in the rabbithole of far-right conspiracy theories. They’re worried, because of course you’re worried when your child is so young and fragile and seemingly beset by danger on all sides. But it’s also true that when it’s too late, it’s too late – not just for you and your baby. When immunisation gets so low that we get outbreaks of measles, and they spread like wildfire because we’ve lost herd immunity (which is a thing you get through high vaccination rates, NOT letting a contagious disease kill thousands of people and crossing your fingers), a lot more children get sick. It’s like putting on your seatbelt before the car starts moving, only the seatbelt goes around your whole community. You just won’t be able to get it on in time when a crash happens.

But we can get immunisation rates up now. Please. Not just for our babies – pregnant people can get vaccinated against flu, COVID and whooping cough, and the antibodies pass to your baby in the womb, giving them protection too.

~

For those with nearly two hours to spare, I really do recommend this video about Andrew Wakefield and his deceptive linking of MMR vaccines with autism, which drives the anti-vaccine movement to this day. Even he didn’t intend to demonize all immunisations, just the combined MMR jab, for reasons that will make you absolutely furious. Slight spoilers, but there is good news: once the disinformation gets taken away, vaccination rates go up again.