Vaccines haven't done anything but help our natural immunities, Green Destiny. That's precisely how they work--inoculating people with attenuated or dead versions of viruses and, in a few cases like the pneumonia and meningitis vaccines, bacteria--to cause the immune system to step up to the plate in a way that protects folks from the full-blown version of the disease. They work by quite literally boosting our immunities.

Natural selection is one thing, but epidemic disease prevention is quite another. Over-use of antibiotics, not vaccines, is what we can attribute bacterial-resistant infectious disease to (like MRSA and VRSA). We're fairly certain that that problem is not so much because of antibiotic over-use as it is because people often don't finish their antibiotics and so the infections stay present and have the opportunity to re-develop in an antibiotic-resistant way.

Vaccines save quite literally millions of lives a year. There are people who don't believe this because we're now living in an age in the developed western world where we don't see these epidemic pediatric diseases like we used to. I wouldn't hesitate to vaccinate a child and want to encourage people who believe they shouldn't to talk seriously with their physicians or nurse-practitioners or to visit third world countries and have a look at those diseases in action. Heck, come see me in Dallas and I'll take you with me to Parkland for a day and show you our immigrant population lining the walls of the emergency room with unvaccinated babies and children who're desperately ill from whooping cough (pertussis). You'll change your mind real quickly. I'm with Reb on this. I wouldn't want my kid exposed to children who hadn't been vaccinated.

Kids need to be vaccinated. Teenage girls need the cervical cancer vaccine. College-aged students need the meningiococcal vaccine. Adults need regular boosters of their childhood vaccines. Nearly everyone needs flu shots, although some years they're more effective than others. Adults past 50 and others, like me because I have heart rhythm trouble and asthma even though I'm not 50 yet, need the pneumonia vaccine. At-risk populations need the hepatitis A vaccine. One of these days we'll have an AIDS vaccine and even more cancer vaccines. When that happens, I'll be the first in line for those, too.