Dear Urban Diplomat: should we keep our kid away from his unvaccinated cousin?
Dear Urban Diplomat,
My wife’s sister is a hard-core anti-vaxxer. We’re expecting in three weeks, and we don’t want her 18-month-old petri dish of a daughter to come over once our son (yes, we found out the sex) arrives. In fact, we’re not so keen on having him play with her, ever. How should we break the news?
—Vax Populi, Riverside
If your objective is to make an ideological point, go ahead and declare that your son shall never share a room with her little Typhoid Mary. But if your goal is just to keep your own kid safe, there’s no need for such extreme embargoes. Let your sister-in-law know that your newborn can’t be exposed to any potential carrier of measles/mumps/rubella/etc. until he’s been inoculated, which generally happens by 12 months. Maybe by then she will have stopped getting her medical advice from Jenny McCarthy.
Send your questions to the Urban Diplomat at urbandiplomat@torontolife.com
![](http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https://torontolife.com/city/dear-urban-diplomat-vax-populi/&title=Dear Urban Diplomat: should we keep our kid away from his unvaccinated cousin?&picture=https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/dear-urban-diplomat-vax-populi.jpg&description=[caption id="attachment_315026" align="alignright" width="292"] (Image: NIAID/Flickr)[/caption]
Dear Urban Diplomat,
My wife’s sister is a hard-core anti-vaxxer. We’re expecting in three weeks, and we don’t want her 18-month-old petri dish of a daughter to come over once our son (yes, we found out the sex) arrives. In fact, we’re not so keen on having him play with her, ever. How should we break the news?
—Vax Populi, Riverside
If your objective is to make an ideological point, go ahead and declare that your son shall never share a room with her little Typhoid Mary. But if your goal is just to keep your own kid safe, there’s no need for such extreme embargoes. Let your sister-in-law know that your newborn can’t be exposed to any potential carrier of measles/mumps/rubella/etc. until he’s been inoculated, which generally happens by 12 months. Maybe by then she will have stopped getting her medical advice from Jenny McCarthy.
Send your questions to the Urban Diplomat at urbandiplomat@torontolife.com){kind=link}
This is not 100% good advice. It is true that some vaccines or initial rounds of of multiple-shot vaccines happen by 12 months, but not all. But the way that herd immunization works means that there’s a small possibility that children who have gotten their shots aren’t themselves immune but still aren’t exposed to these diseases as all those around them are immune through their vaccinations. Vaccines don’t work on everyone, but if the vast majority of us are vaccinated, we protect those on whom vaccines don’t work.
Point being: the risks are far greater for totally unvaccinated newborns, of course, but they don’t stop at a year.
Lastly: I don’t think this is an “ideological point.” An ideology should be all-encompassing. Anti-vaxxing is certainly less fully developed than that. Painting those who oppose anti-vaxxing as having an ideological disagreement with those who are for it gives far, far too much credence to anti-vaxxers, most of whom (in my experience) consume the Advil, or get their broken bones set, or get their eyes tested, or get their teeth numbed before surgery by the very same medical professionals who also desperately wants them to get their kids vaccinated. It’s not an ideology: it’s a lack of common sense, and a lack of consistency, masquerading as one.
Until your own infant is vaccinated (completely), I would use the cousin as the “canary in the coal mine”.
Well said.
Anti-vaxxing is bullshit, and needs to be opposed and denounced-full stop, straight up. If the family of the non-vaccinated child can’t get that not being vaccinated is dangerous to others and (eventually) to the child, perhaps being dis-invited should make the point enough that they will smarten the heck up and get their child vaccinated.
It’s a tragedy that we can’t have non-vaccinated kids banned from going to school as a health measure just like in the city of New York, but what the person in the article wanted to do works, too.
Use Uber code UBERTORONTOFREERIDE to get $20 off your first ride. Just download the Uber app and enter the code. Valid anywhere in Canada!