I Wish I Would Have Known

---

Someone once told me that vaccines were safe and that I was just looking for something to blame for my son’s autism. But they had no idea what I was going through. Unfortunately, most people won’t recognize the truth until they are personally affected. Cognitive dissonance can blind us to the evidence that’s right in front of us.

I had doubts about vaccinating my son. A few people hinted that vaccines might be harming him, but no one ever said it outright. I wish I had trusted my instincts. I wish someone had told me that vaccines can cause harm and that there are hundreds of studies proving it. I wish I had known that the issues we were seeing could have been caused by vaccines.

So many parents live with this regret. It’s heartbreaking, and unless you’ve experienced it, it’s impossible to truly understand. Watching your child disappear—seeing a child who once spoke suddenly stop speaking, a child who was always happy stop smiling—is a pain beyond words. Unless you’ve seen your child struggle to speak, refuse to eat for weeks, or bang their head against the floor during a meltdown they can’t control, you can’t fully grasp the depth of this experience. Unless you’ve been in the backseat of your car, helpless as your child thrashes, screams, and cries because you exited the parking lot the wrong way, you just can’t understand.

We would give anything to go back and make a different choice. The guilt is immense and difficult to bear. But we have no choice but to keep moving forward. When you have a child with disabilities and a future full of uncertainty, moving forward becomes essential. The fear of what will happen to them when we’re gone, of who will care for them if we’re not here, is overwhelming. And it weighs even heavier, knowing it didn’t have to be this way.

I think most parents would agree with me when I say that I would rather it had been a genetic issue—something that was simply beyond our control. At least then, there would be some comfort in knowing that nothing I could have done would have changed it. But knowing that my son could have had a normal life, that he didn’t have to start therapy five days a week at just two years old, is a heavy burden to carry. It’s heartbreaking to think he didn’t have to be so sensitive that, at times, it was unbearable to even leave the house because the sound of the outside world was too much for him.

To know these struggles could have been avoided if I had refused the Hepatitis B vaccine because it was only safety tested for 5 DAYS! Not even in babies who were just born but in adults. Also, he has a 0% chance of getting Hepatitis B at this point in his life, and studies have shown that boys vaccinated with the Hepatitis B vaccine in the first month of life have a 3-fold higher risk of autism than boys who aren't vaccinated until after one month.

If I would have refused the rotavirus vaccine because most babies (who are the only ones at risk of dying from rotavirus) are protected against rotavirus with breastfeeding. Or because in the vaccine trials that compared the vaccine to the vaccine minus the antigen, 1 in 30 to 1 in 40 control group participants suffered a severe medical event. 43 infants in the Rotarix trial died, and 20 died in the RotaTeq trials.

If I would have refused the DTaP vaccine because the Diphtheria mortality rate dropped 87% before the vaccine for Diphtheria was used widely, and the antitoxin used to treat diphtheria since 1891 has a clinical efficacy of 97%. On the other hand, "Receiving 3 doses of diphtheria toxoid vaccine is 87% effective against symptomatic disease and reduces transmission by 60%. Vaccinated individuals can become colonized and transmit; consequently, vaccination alone can only interrupt transmission in 28% of outbreak settings, making isolation and antibiotics essential."

Because Tetanus rates have always been rare, with 500-600 cases annually before the vaccine. Among all persons with reported tetanus from 2001-2008, the CDC states that "in the multivariable model, comparing age ≥65 years versus <65 years, diabetes versus no diabetes, and no doses of vaccination versus 1 dose, neither diabetes nor vaccination were statistically significant."

Because a study exposing baboons to pertussis showed that those who were vaccinated previously carried the bacterium for 5 days longer than the unvaccinated baboons and were able to infect other baboons with the bacterium. Conversely, the baboons who had previously been infected by pertussis were not able to spread the bacterium to other baboons following re-exposure.

If I would have refused the Hib vaccine because death rates from Hib were 1 in 2 million prior to the vaccine. Also because studies show that vaccination with the Hib vaccine may induce diabetes related autoantibodies. My dad was the only diabetic in our family. He was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes after getting very sick following a vaccination he received at age 12.

If I had refused the Pneumococcal vaccine, which protects against 13 of the 90+ different serotypes. In the clinical trials, there were 18 fewer cases than expected of Pneumococcal infection, but almost 1,200 infants in the vaccine group had emergency room visits, and 500 were hospitalized.

Finally, if I would have refused the polio vaccine, one of which causes more cases of polio than wild-type polio itself, and because the other states in the vaccine insert, "Although no causal relationship has been established, deaths have occurred in temporal association after vaccination of infants with IPV."

If I had taken the time to research vaccines, just as we carefully researched the reliability of a new car or the quality of a new TV, I would have known. I could have changed the course of my son’s life if I had just known.

So, to the person who thinks I’m simply looking for something to blame for my son’s autism, you’re wrong. As parents, we would give our lives for our kids. Imagine, as a parent, realizing that you could have protected your child from something that would cause them lifelong harm, but you didn’t. You were supposed to be their voice because they couldn’t speak up for themselves. If they could have, they might have told you that their brain was on fire. You didn’t protect them from this harm, and now you have to live with that, watching your child struggle every day as a constant reminder. Why would we choose to blame our child’s pain on something we could have prevented? If we were simply looking for something to blame, I can assure you we wouldn’t choose this.