HEY, THIS IS IMPORTANT.  I WILL TRY TO BE CLEAR AND CONCISE.

Whooping cough (pertussis) is making a comeback, largely because people tend to be unaware of the fact that the vaccine OR natural immunity only last for seven years.  Now, if you’re relatively healthy, have no pre-existing respiratory conditions (including asthma, folks), and are between sixteen and, oh, forty-five, then whooping cough is probably just going to be a pain in the ass–you’ll cough for a while, it’ll be uncomfortable, but you’ll probably be fine, because your immune system will eventually crush it.

IF YOU DO NOT FIT ALL THREE OF THOSE CONDITIONS, WHOOPING COUGH WILL PROBABLY FUCK YOU UP REALLY BAD.  LIKE, POTENTIALLY LETHAL BAD.  Remember, folks, whooping cough used to be a major killer.  I do not fuck around with this sort of thing.

Story time: once upon a time, Moran was a sickly little baby who lived with a bunch of other people in a commune (forgive my parents their trusting youth, they are now appropriately cynical of everyone and everything).  Naturally, these alternative hippie people didn’t like getting their asses vaccinated.  Moran, being an infant, had a limit on what vaccinations she could get.  So when one of the people in the commune got a persistent cough, Moran ended up with whooping cough at ten months old.  

Now, let me be clear, I had a serious proclivity to being extremely sick.  It wasn’t genetic or even inherent to my body (my immune system is actually superior to most people’s, probably because I was sick so much), it was a result of the environment, but obviously my pediatrician was more interested in keeping me alive in the short term than exposing me to possibly hazardous or weakening bacteria, even in the form of vaccinations.  So even if I’d been old enough, I probably wouldn’t have been vaccinated, because my immune system was so crippled that it would have been very problematic.  I got whooping cough anyway, and the thing about whooping cough is, well, the treatments can be rough, and in my situation I couldn’t have withstood them.  And they don’t always work.

Let me hit you with a few numbers.  Thirty percent.  Three-zero.  Losing thirty percent of your body weight (assuming that you’re not obese) is lethal.  Whooping cough is a massive drain on your body’s resources, and on top of that it’s hard to eat through the coughing fits.

L'il Baby Moran dropped twenty-five percent of her body weight in four weeks.  An infant who had no genetic disorders or exceptional health problems that wouldn’t have been resolved by a move into a better constructed non-commune almost died of this very preventable disease.  Less than twenty years ago.  Currently, I am very healthy, although I still tend to get respiratory issues more than anything else, but it took not weeks, not months, but years to regain that weight loss because it was so extreme.  I am also highly allergic to the new TDaP (tetanus, diptheria, and pertussis) vaccine; it causes me to spike a massive fever and hallucinate vividly horrifying images for forty-eight hours.  Yes, I did find that out by testing it, and for a while we thought I would be at risk for all three permanently, because I couldn’t handle the newest shot.  I still get vaccinated for those diseases (with an earlier form of the shot, so there’s no major reaction) to protect myself and others.  

So let’s just be clear here: you might think that your kids will get natural immunity to this sort of thing and be fine.  But you might also risk their death.  Herd immunity aside (although for fuck’s sake, get vaccinated even if all three of those conditions I mentioned earlier are true for you, because you’ll be protecting other people who can’t get the shot, and those three conditions are no guarantee that you’ll be fine), you will actually literally risk your child’s life.  Their life, not their comfort or their mood.  Their life.

That makes you a bad parent by any definition.  

Protect yourself, protect your friends, protect your children.  Get vaccinated.