that have serious, long-term, negative reactions to vaccinations of one type or another. I'm in favor of caution, always, and I'd like to see vaccinations spaced out a bit more, instead of cramming a dozen of them into the first year of a kid's life.

That said, I'm a historian by education and a history teacher by trade. There is absolutely no debate possible that vaccinations have saved billions of lives. Relative risk here is shockingly poorly understood by some people. Your kid might have a (medically unprovable) reaction to a vaccine and end up less functional. I'm fairly sure that does happen. You know what else makes a kid less functional? Polio. The chance of polio contraction in 1900 was about 1 in 50. Now? It's zero. As in, zero. There are only three countries in the world where it's even possible to contract it (22 total cases in 2018). That is provably, demonstrably, incontrovertibly because of the polio vaccine.

There is a non-zero chance that vaccines will cause your child problems. There is a far, far higher chance that not being vaccinated will cause your child problems. The difference is close to the difference between dying from lightning strike and dying from heart disease--another area where risk management is shockingly crappy.

Maybe it's just a human thing.