Ben Shapiro begs people to vaccinate kids after daughter gets whooping cough

Taken from The Ben Shapiro Show on AM 770 KTTH.

About a week ago, my daughter had started coughing and she was choking and turning blue. It was really terrible. She’d get in these coughing fits and couldn’t stop herself, couldn’t catch her breath.

When we took our 13-month-old in, the doctor asked if she was fully vaccinated. We said, yes she’s fully vaccinated. The doctor said, well she can’t have whooping cough. It’s got to be something else – bronchitis – or she just has a virus.

We took her home, but she was still coughing so we brought her back a few days later. They said, well it’s probably some sort of bacteria. Let’s try to knock it out with an antibiotic. They said if she keeps coughing, give it to her. So she kept coughing and we gave it to her.

The following Monday she was still coughing. But thank God my wife is in medical school. My wife said she’s got all the symptoms of whooping cough. We need to have them give her tests x, y, and z.

So I went into the doctor and we got the tests. Sure enough she had whooping cough. So they gave us azithromycin and told us to put her on it ASAP.

The way that this works is that azithromycin, which is the antibiotic that you use for whooping cough, it doesn’t actually get rid of the whooping cough. It minimizes the transmissibility because whooping cough is highly transmissible.

If you are in touch with somebody, if you shake hands, if you hug somebody, if you are in breathing distance of someone with whooping cough, there is a 70 to 80 percent chance, according to public health officials, that you come down with or at least become a carrier of whooping cough.

Now whooping cough isn’t going to hurt you if you’re an adult because you have high lung capacity. But if it’s an infant under a year, the death rate for whooping cough is high.

So we get the antibiotic and Saturday night we put the baby to bed and about an hour after we put her to bed, we heard her coughing. And she doesn’t just cough. If you’ve never heard whooping cough, it’s the scariest thing in the world. She starts coughing and she can’t stop.

There is no worse feeling for a parent than when your kid is sick and you can’t do anything about it. I took the baby and held her horizontally trying to get her to breath. She was coughing and coughing until she vomited. So she’s coughing, vomiting, and she can’t breathe. She’s becoming quasi-unresponsive, she’s clearly low energy and down on oxygen.

We decided to take her to the ER. She was still coughing, crying and vomiting. The nurses were trying to work with her and she was thrashing about. That’s making her cry more and the crying is making her cough and the coughing is making her vomit and the vomiting is making her not breathe.

I got down on my hands and knees to try to clean up her vomit because we were in kind of a public area. I was so upset that there was like a primal growl coming out of me. I’m watching the baby and nothing I’m doing is making her better.

Eventually she calmed down. They put an oxygen mask near her that boosted her oxygen levels and they got ready to send us home. We said “What should we do?” They said, if she turns blue, call the paramedics. Which is not very comforting to a parent.

The next day we get the call from public health because it’s a public health threat. They told us everybody who has been in touch with her has to get the antibiotic so they don’t transmit it because adults can carry it without having it.

The point of all this is: get your kids vaccinated.

Don’t think you’re just getting them vaccinated because it will always prevent pertussis. It won’t. My kid is fully vaccinated and it doesn’t prevent pertussis all the way. It’s 80 percent effective. But get your kid vaccinated because it’s so transmissible and it is so dangerous that even a kid who is vaccinated can have this.

Please I beg you, talk to your doctor. While you may think it will only affect your kid if they don’t get vaccinated, in this case, it affected my kid, not just your kid.

Taken from The Ben Shapiro Show on AM 770 KTTH.

JS