Why are vaccines associated with children?

We are very specific about this. We demand that all children be vaccinated, as early as possible, for everything. We cry and shame each other when a parent delays giving a vaccine to a child even for a month, even when it's for a sexually transmitted disease. Get your children vaccinated!

But what about yourself? Vaccines have nothing to do with being a child. They're supposed to be for everyone. Yet no one chooses to take them on their own behalf. Adults don't get booster shots. So what happened to herd immunity? Scientists are always discovering that vaccines wear out more quickly than previously thought. Even the MMR which was thought to be lifelong, the new guidelines call for us to get booster shots every ten years for life, and some people even think it should be every four years. Then there is the yearly flu shot which despite massive publicity can't seem to break 50% compliance. And that's after new laws requiring medical staff to get them, and new recommendations for pregnant women and seniors to get them, reversing the long held old recommendations that they avoid them at all costs.

What about immigrants? If a person from Sweden comes to live in America, she will be severely under-vaccinated by our standards, yet we don't require her to become fully immunized. We don't even think about this. What good is a vaccine schedule if we don't enforce it on anyone but children?

All this focus on children is leaving the general population vulnerable to outbreaks of preventable infectious disease. They just don't understand the need to protect themselves from risk. Maybe we have a false sense of security because we think about how 95% of us were vaccinated as children. We're really good at that. We go out of our way to protect others, while being cavalier with our own bodies. We don't see the ticking time bomb waiting to explode.

Does the CDC not know what they are doing? Or do they know too well? People are stubborn.