When I said the benefit is a possibility, I meant that it’s a possibility in the sense that you don’t know if you personally would necessarily get the flu or polio, etc if you didn’t take the vaccination. Of course, that reasoning doesn’t apply so well to the chicken pox but it definitely applies to the flu (which is what I had mainly been talking about) and to most other things.
And I wasn’t trying to imply in any way that one shouldn’t take the polio vaccine. I was just making very theoretical comments about the reasoning involved in these decisions. My comments were meant purely academically.
Additionally, I hadn’t even been thinking of polio at all – I was thinking of the more recent vaccinations, the ones that were not around yet when I was a kid, and are for things that are either less serious or less wide-spread (such as flu or chicken pox). I had assumed that people who are anti-vaccination are against the more recent ones (such as flu and chicken pox) whose necessity, benefit, and possible risks might not be as clear-cut yet. Are they against all vaccinations including polio and whatever the standard ones are that we all got as kids (those of us born in the 60’s, 70’s & 80’s)?