It's not easy being a parent. On the one hand, a buxom, C-list television personality, backed both by anecdotal experience and fraudulent/discredited research, is telling you that vaccines absoposilutely cause autism. Scary. But on the other hand, Washington state's embarrassingly low vaccination rate is actually killing babies:

Very young infants in our state are getting pertussis (whooping cough) at much higher rates than people of other ages. The rate of whooping cough in babies is nearly 10 times greater than the combined rate of all people of all ages in Washington. Already this year, 58 infants younger than one year old have been diagnosed with whooping cough. Twenty-two of them were hospitalized, including two that died. Of the 22 babies who were hospitalized, 18 were three months old or younger.

“Whooping cough is a serious illness, especially for babies who are too young to be vaccinated,” said State Health Officer and pediatrician Dr. Maxine Hayes. “Older kids and adults can help protect babies by getting the pertussis vaccine."

Who to trust? Jenny McCarthy? Or reality?

See, here's the deal. Infants younger than two months of age can't be vaccinated for highly contagious pertussis. Yet up to 90 percent of them who are exposed to an infected person will catch the disease. And some of them will die.

That's why our public health strategy is to vaccinate everybody who can be vaccinated, so that our most vulnerable are protected by herd immunity.

Refusing to vaccinate your children doesn't just put your own babies at risk, it endangers all of them. So don't be stupid. And don't be a baby killer. Vaccinate your kids.