#my mother is into woo woo stuff but we all got every vaccine she knew about so I assume not

[shadowmasterthirteen]

I want to say something about "pox parties" here. I'm a younger millennial and got chicken pox 2-3 years before the vaccine would have been available to me.

Chicken pox has a long incubation period during which you are contagious and which is generally before symptoms begin to show. This is part of why it's so contagious (the R0 I saw was 10-12), before the vaccine the annual number of cases tracked with the number of people born. It never leaves your system and can set you up for shingles later in life. And chickenpox itself can be deadly. In 1990, before the vaccine 8,900 people would die in a year. Getting to adulthood without a case in a pre vaccine world was statistically unlikely.

I remember hearing of cases of adults catching it because there was no vaccine and they'd gotten through childhood.

So most of what parents could do was choose *when* a kid got chickenpox. Very few diseases have ever matched chickenpox for contagiousness and relative* safety. That's where the pox party comes in.

Luckily we have vaccines now. This has reduced deaths and made shingles rarer for vaccinated people (you can get a shingles vaccine and anyone over 50 should, especially if they've had chickenpox) this is all great news. There's also the herd immunity which is probably why gen Z are more likely to have not had chickenpox even if they really aren't vaccinated (recommendations are for infancy so it's possible you are unaware).

Anyway that's the reason why for a brief time pox parties were a neutral idea and also why now they're a bad idea (you can avoid it by getting vaccinated) and they've also always been a bad idea for any other illness (most other illnesses are easier to avoid and much much more* deadly).

*I mentioned how it did kill kids right? But compared to a measles it was very unlikely to kill any given child

I have a theory about gen z and millennials, so please help me out with this poll.

Please make sure to vote as to whether you got vaccinated as a child or not, if you did not get chicken pox. Take care, spread this around, and vaccinate your fucking kids. Poll is not exclusive to any country. Vote no matter where you're from.