Opinion: 'Yes' to tough stand on vaccines

"Autism or death? Hard choice." Sonya Bateson shares her views on vaccinations and why they're so important. Photo/file

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has proposed banning unvaccinated children from early childcare centres and Labour's Andrew Little has suggested New Zealand do the same.

The children of parents who have personal objections against vaccines, rather than medical exemptions, will be turned away from childcare centres under the proposal.

I couldn't agree more with this.

There is a small, but vocal, group of "anti-vaxxers" out there who believe vaccines don't work, are dangerous, or are a money-making scheme for "Big Pharma".

These people scare themselves silly by reading on the internet about the "dangerous" additives in vaccines, such as formaldehyde - an organic compound that is already produced naturally in the human body - or of supposed side effects such as autism, a theory that has been thoroughly debunked by numerous scientific studies worldwide, including one that involved more than 95,000 children.

Even if vaccines did cause autism, the risks of having measles, for example, are far worse than being on the autism spectrum.

As the Ministry of Health says: "As well as causing death, measles can cause pneumonia, deafness and brain damage."

Autism or death. Hard choice.

Vaccines aren't always 100 per cent effective and there are sectors of society, such as children receiving cancer treatment, who can't be vaccinated.

It is these people who are in danger from the unvaccinated - the more people who have immunity against a disease, the less chance it has of spreading.

Many diseases we vaccinate against occur in such low rates people have forgotten about the cemeteries full of the graves of children dead from diphtheria, measles, smallpox and whooping cough.

Or, as one commenter put it - no need to vaccinate all your children. Only the ones you want to keep.