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.
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