Mom Changes Her Anti-Vax Stance After Entire Family Gets Sick

Kristen O’Meara refused to vaccinate her children for more than five years.  Then her entire family contracted Rotavirus, a potentially deadly stomach virus that can be prevented with a vaccination. It was a wake-up call she couldn’t ignore. O’Meara decided to forego vaccines when her first daughter, Natasha, was born in 2010. “I entered motherhood with what I thought was a healthy skepticism regarding vaccination,” she wrote in a New York Post article last week. The Chicago-area special needs teacher purposely sought out books and research that confirmed what she already believed to be true: vaccinations were dangerous and could be linked to anything from ADHD to autism. “I got absorbed in the anti-vax culture and secretly thought of myself as being superior to others,” O’Meara wrote in the New York Post. “As far as I was concerned, [parents who vaccinate] didn’t stop to question and were just sheep following the herd.” However, O’Meara’s staunch beliefs were put to a painful test in 2015 ― all three of her daughters contracted Rotavirus, and she and her husband fell ill as well. “It was horrible to see my daughters hunched over on the toilet, crying from the painful cramping that lasted a week after the acute illness,” O’Meara wrote in a blog post for pro-vaccination organization Voices for Vaccines. “Once I realized what we all had, and tha...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news