Vaccines do not work 100 percent of the time. Due to this shortcoming, a community can only be protected if the majority of the people are immunized. When a large segment of the community has not received vaccination, even those who are immunized are vulnerable to these infections and community outbreaks. You cannot skip vaccinating your children and just count on your friends and neighbors to vaccinate theirs. They might be counting on you to have your children vaccinated so they don't have to vaccinate theirs.

Eventually, everyone would be hoping that everyone else would vaccinate their children, and no one would be vaccinated in the community. You also know now that vaccination comes with some risks. If no one wants to take on that risk with their own children, then ultimately no one would be vaccinated and the entire community would be vulnerable to infectious outbreaks and everyone suffers. The consequences of having outbreaks spreading through the entire society are ominous, and the world your children will live in would not be so different from your grandparents' more than fifty years ago, when whooping cough and polio claimed thousands of lives and maimed even more.

In many ways, every child is in this together. You either take on a small risk by vaccinating your children (and hoping that your neighbors do the same), or the entire community suffers, including your children. Your children's future is in your hands. What you do and don't do right now can affect generations of children to come. Keep in mind that the people affected will not just be other people's children but your children and grandchildren and great grandchildren.

It is still not an easy decision, given that vaccines are not risk-free and serious side effects can change your child's life forever. But if every parent decided not to vaccinate, the future will indeed be very dark and grim for humanity. The world will gradually drift back into a time when infectious diseases claim young lives regularly and randomly.