Mará Rose Williams: Some moms fight for vaccines, others have died for them

A story came across my computer the other day about immunization workers, many of them moms, being killed in Karachi, Pakistan, for trying to administer polio vaccines to children. The Taliban have imposed an immunization ban in certain regions.

That got me to thinking about all the mothers in the U.S. who have fairly easy access to vaccines for their children and how many refuse them for whatever reason.

I’m just saying.

In Karachi, since 2012 nearly 70 health workers have been killed because some irrational people there think the little drops of polio vaccine they squeeze into the babies’ mouths are some kind of anti-Islam forced family planning. Whatever that means. Some workers even take the drops themselves trying to convince folks that they are only there to help.

I also thought, what I wouldn’t have given for some oral vaccination drops when my oldest was a baby. Back in the ’90s we had shots, and my son had one heck of a phobia about needles.

Oh, I know that no little tyke likes getting stuck (of course it never bothered my youngest). But Trey’s fear and dislike were insane. Just the mere mention of getting a shot would send this boy into an uncontrollable tantrum. And I’m talking about a child who normally was as calm as they come. Rarely cried or misbehaved.

But say “doctor” or “shot,” and he would go off. And, I know it’s cruel, but you could get the boy to do anything by telling him the alternative was a trip to the doctor.

Don’t worry, I didn’t resort to that often.

I remember once though, at the pediatrician’s office, doc asked me to hold the boy for a shot in the thigh. I think Trey was less than 2 years old. I thought I was holding him pretty tight. But when the needle broke his skin he lurched away from me and hit the needle hard enough to bend the thing and nearly broke it off in his leg. Sudden superhuman strength. All the while screaming at the top of his lungs.

I dreaded going to the doctor with him for a vaccine. The husband and I used to try to push that duty off on the other. Most of the time we’d team up.

The point is, we never missed. We both remember smallpox vaccinations that left a lifelong shoulder scar and eradicated the disease. So we trusted immunizations and held our kid down so he could get his.

But lots of Americans refuse them, believing that as parents they’re doing what they should, protecting their little guys from something even meaner than the illness the vaccine prevents.

They willingly take the risk their child could get sick, or carry some illness to other children at school or playing around the neighborhood — or going to Disneyland.

Meanwhile, elsewhere people are dying to give and to get vaccines.

By the way, Trey’s a healthy, grown man now, and he got over his fear of needles in his teens. Or at least by then he’d stopped crying about it.

This story was originally published March 8, 2015 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Mará Rose Williams: Some moms fight for vaccines, others have died for them."