Growing Up in an Anti-Vax Family

by Tessa Williams 

I was never convinced that vaccines were bad. I knew that they helped fight preventable diseases, but I was too young to question why my mother wouldn’t let me get them. 

I remember an incident when I was 12. I got to school that day, and they told us we’d be getting a vaccine. I wasn’t scared of the needle, I was terrified of how angry my mother would be if she found out I got it, so I ditched school for the first time in my life and ran home crying.

Growing up, my mom was very reluctant to believe me whenever I was sick. I have severe dermatitis and eczema, which at times were excruciatingly painful. The only reason she took me to a doctor was because I had a rash that looked a lot like Paget’s disease. After the doctor confirmed my skin conditions were not caused by it, my mother went back to not caring, and I had to literally beg her to buy the medication that the doctor had prescribed.

I’m 24 now, and just got my immunization records. I found out I only received vaccines up until I was seven years old, which makes me luckier than my completely unvaccinated siblings. The moment I left home I tried my best to catch up on the vaccines that I missed. But my mother has successfully brainwashed my siblings into thinking that vaccines are more likely to kill you than help you. She thinks that I am going to die from a blood clot because I’m vaccinated.

I’m incredibly worried about my siblings being raised in that environment.

My younger sister just turned 18, and she’s about to head off to university. She’s going to study naturopathic medicine. This means she’ll end up with a crap ton of student debt for a field that offers no financial stability. 

On top of that, she follows the work of a naturopathic doctor, Barbara O’Neil, who was barred from practicing medicine because her medical advice may have killed people. She told cancer patients to take baking soda instead of chemotherapy. I’ve shown my sister the evidence that this person is a dangerous fraud and a quack, but she refused to see the truth, claiming that the evidence was all lies, and that “big pharma” was trying to silence her.

My mom and grandmother gave my sister Barbara O’Neil’s books for her birthday. They’ve successfully brainwashed her and she’s going to ruin her life to follow this path, and I’m incredibly worried that my other two siblings will end up doing the same.

I just feel helpless. I can’t force them to become pro-vaccine, but they’re too stubborn to admit they’re wrong. When I visit my family, I get a lecture. Every single time I visit: “We love you, we just want you to make the right choices before it’s too late.”

At the end of the day, kids don’t have the capacity to understand long-term consequences like most adults do, so parents should have the power to decide. But not all parents end up making good decisions for their kids either. It’s a pretty nuanced topic with no clear-cut answer since every family and every situation is different.

I believe that when it comes to medical issues, parents should generally trust the doctors, especially if multiple doctors are telling them the exact same thing. Like, yes, bad reactions can happen, but on the whole, vaccines have made a lot of deadly diseases become almost extinct. It’s incredibly hypocritical of anti-vaccine parents to force their misinformed choices onto their kids when 99% of them were vaccinated as kids themselves, including my mom.

Tessa Williams is a young adult who loves to swim, read and write, and aspires to become an author one day. Her story, like all others on this blog, was a voluntary submission. If you want to help make a difference, submit your own post by emailing us through our contact form. We depend on real people like you sharing experience to protect others from misinformation.