Vaccination is a tough issue and has been a difficult one for me
to figure out. My kids are 13 and 15, so when they were infants,
the situation was quite different. I will give you my thoughts
on a few individual vaccines. Polio: IIRC, there has not been a
case of wild polio in the western hemisphere since the 1970s
(unless there have been some since the late 1990s when I did my
research). At the time my kids were born, the only option was
the live oral polio vaccine, which caused a handful of polio
cases each year, both in infants and in others exposed the
shedding of the live vaccine in the infants' poop. To me, this
was a no-brainer: if there was a higher chance of my baby
contracting polio if he got the vaccine, why the hell would I
get it? The injectable (killed) vaccine is much safer, but I
don't know the details on it. If you are planning international
travel, that is a whole other situation. If you are in frequent
contact with immigrant communities or with other people who
travel to countries where po