"Not to stir the pot even more however when a vaccine does go bad, it goes really bad"I'm frightfully aware of that. I'm old enough to remember the polio epidemic in the 1950s and the bad batch of polio vaccine that killed kids.
I wasn't in the US and the Salk vaccine wasn't available where I was living and it was another five or so years before we were vaccinated. Before that one kid in my school class died and another ended up in calipers.
Despite everyone knowing about the bad batch and the deaths I cannot tell you how relieved everyone was when the vaccine finally arrived. No one—not one single kid—at my school skipped the vaccine. To not have it would have been unthinkable, it wasn't even a consideration.
Frankly, it horrifies me how risk averse and timid people have become these days. How thinking has changed since that time is frightening.
That's not to say things don't go wrong—they do and all too often as you are aware, and even at this distance I can't help but feel sorry for both you and your wife.
Right, that Salk vaccine killed people but saved millions of others, even now the live attenuated Sabin vaccine occasionally goes rogue mutates and gives people polio but both of those vaccines have almost eradicated that fucking horrible disease from the face of the planet, it's only politics and misinformation that have stopped that from happening.
What are we to do when things are beneficial on a large scale yet are nevertheless responsible for a small number of tragedies? For instance, almost everyone on the planet loves their smartphone yet they kill innocent people—albeit indirectly when irresponsible drivers who are driving and texting at the same time hit and kill pedestrians.
When that happens we don't call for smartphones to be banned, same when a passenger jet clashes. But it's a different story with vaccines, fluoride in water, chemicals in foods. For some illogical reason suddenly all hell breaks loose and people become quite irrational.
BTW, over the years I've had many, many dozen vaccine shots for many different diseases and I've never had a negative reaction. That's not to say it won't happen on my next visit to the doctor or, say, to next person who's next in line in the doctor's surgery.
Unfortunately, life's dangerous and it's eventually fatal. As I see it, these scientific discoveries—whilst imperfect—ameliorate that condition somewhat.