Great News! My Baby Is Vaccinated!

A doctor examines a baby. Image source.

You guys you guys you guys, I have such amazing wonderful news! My child is never going to get sick from hepatitis B. Yeah, see hepatitis B is a disease which can cause liver damage and a whole lot of problems. But guess what! My little son, Square Root, is not going to have those problems. He is vaccinated.

Also, rotavirus. Oh my goodness you guys, I have great news! My child is never gonna get sick from rotavirus. It's a really nasty virus that causes diarrhea and can even lead to death. (Mayo Clinic says it causes 215,000 deaths annually. And "Before the development of a vaccine, most children in the United States had been infected with the virus at least once by age 5.") 

Sounds awful, right? Well I am very happy to tell you that little Square Root is vaccinated for it. He's not going to get rotavirus. Ever.

And more good news: He's not going to get polio. He's vaccinated for it. He's not going to get Japanese encephalitis. Or pneumococcal disease. Or tuberculosis. Or a whole bunch of other diseases. He's vaccinated!

Well this is awesome. We don't have to worry about him catching any of these diseases.

It's astounding to think about how different the world is now from the world before vaccines. Nasty childhood diseases were common and could cause life-long effects or even death, and that was just the way it was. Can you imagine telling parents 100 years ago that in the future we won't have to worry about any of those things at all? Like, all those childhood diseases will just *be gone*. Polio, measles, whooping cough, and so on- they just won't be a thing anymore. Can you imagine trying to tell that to parents living back then? It would be unbelievable for them.

Hundreds or thousands of children used to die every year from those diseases, and now they just ... don't.

Like, they just don't.

You can just, like, opt out. You read a description of what polio is, you say to yourself "how bout we don't do that" and then you just get your kid vaccinated and that's that.

Like, holy crap. That is amazing news.

It should be completely mind-blowing to think how good vaccines are- but most people don't really think about that, because vaccines have so effectively eliminated these terrible diseases, that people aren't even aware of how terrible they were. 

But anyway. Just wanted to share my good news. My baby is vaccinated.