From Unvaccinated to Vaccinated: My Reckoning with The Wellness World

For 4 days they weren’t sure if I was going to live, and for another week they kept me in the hospital for recovery. When they sent me home, they told my mom that I might have learning challenges and I might lose my hearing.

My story was always told as a win for alternative healing because I then went home and received Yoga, Brain Gym, Cranial Sacral, Touch For Health Kinesiology, Essential Oils, Supplements, and so much more. And it all seemed to work: I didn’t lose my hearing, and although I identify as a highly sensitive person, which I’ve learned many autistic people do as well, I loved learning–I graduated at the top of my high school class and continued on to get a graduate degree.

Yet, a huge piece of the picture was missing. Something that I didn’t fully evaluate or question until 2020.

My parents were deep in the wellness world, and there was a lot of fear-mongering about vaccines. I remember being told that vaccines interrupt healthy development and cause Autism and ADD. 

Here’s the thing, though: My illness massively interrupted my healthy development. It left lasting effects that showed up as incredibly painful earaches throughout childhood; very sensitive ears, including sensitivity to sound and any changes in pressure, and a tendency toward ear infections even into adulthood.

Even though I am alive thanks to medicine and medical doctors, the distrust of doctors permeated my life. Doctors were seen as pill-pushing, Big Pharma-funded, and clueless about day-to-day sicknesses and root causes. And yet, when I was deathly ill as a baby we relied on doctors, when my brother broke a bone we relied on doctors, when I stepped on a nail we relied on doctors (and I got my first vaccine, a tetanus shot, at age 10 as a result), and when my mom needed open heart surgery we relied on doctors. 

So doctors could be trusted, but only in emergencies? I know, it doesn’t really make sense. 

Similarly, vaccinations were okay in the emergency of the tetanus shot. So when I reached college and wanted to travel to countries that required vaccinations – because the only thing I remembered hearing was that they were bad for babies and development – I went ahead and, per my doctor’s recommendation, got fully vaccinated at age 20. Even then, it took another 15 years (enter 2020) before the wellness world that I grew up in, and even became an active part of, collided with medical science. 

Not only did I experience what we all did at that time, the Global COVID Pandemic, but I also happened to be living in the United States epicenter of the pandemic in New York City AND was pregnant with my first child. 

While we were hearing of neighbors dying, friends getting terribly ill, and other friends’ loved ones being hospitalized, some of the wellness leaders that I had trusted began to deny the pandemic and go against public safety recommendations. 

This was my reckoning. 

Wellness leaders that I had followed and even supported were suddenly denying my reality and putting my friends, neighbors, and family at greater risk. 

During this time, I came to see not only the harm of others in the wellness world, but also how I, personally, had been causing harm. The harm had been there all along. I had seen glimpses of it in unregulated essential oils and supplements, in the focus of making money versus educating people, in the perfectionism and shame, in the hyper-individualism, and in the racism, classism, sexism, and more that exists in many wellness spaces. These were things I had experienced and witnessed my whole life, but didn’t yet have the language or understanding to call it out and name it for what it was. 

Along with all of that, I began to really learn about vaccines, and I started to get curious. If I had been vaccinated as a baby, would I have gotten sick in the first place? If I had been vaccinated as a baby, would I be living with chronic ear pain and nervous system sensitivity? 

At one point, I called up a good friend of my husband, a doctor, and asked what he knew about my childhood illness and vaccines. He said he specifically remembered his dad, also a doctor, telling him about how they saw babies who died from bacterial spinal meningitis on a regular basis until the introduction of the Hib vaccine. He said the deaths of babies from bacterial spinal meningitis literally disappeared after the introduction of that vaccine. 

I could cry right now thinking of all the babies whose lives were saved.

There is, of course, no guarantee that the vaccine would have made it to our tiny town in Colorado in time for me to receive it before falling ill, but there was no question in my mind after hearing this (along with the other research and data about the effectiveness of vaccines) that I would vaccinate my children and also happily get the COVID vaccine when it came out. 

I’ll be honest with you, I still envisioned my baby in green and blue light when she got her first vaccines, and I followed recommendations from my Acupuncturist friend to hydrate and do physical exercise before and after getting the COVID vaccination. I continue to utilize both wellness and medical practices side by side. 

Lastly, I will admit that it was hard to arrive at this point, hard to admit that I was wrong and that the information I learned and shared was not only incorrect, but dangerous. I had a full-on identity crisis in 2020. It took me a year to process before publicly sharing what I had learned and how I was working toward deeper integrity in my wellness business and in life in general. And I know continually expanding my knowledge and maintaining that integrity will be an ongoing, lifelong journey.

Kelsey Fox Bennett Boyd, M.Ed. is [bio]. Her story, like all others on this blog, was a voluntary submission. If you want to help make a difference, submit your own post by emailing us through our contact form. We depend on real people like you sharing experience to protect others from misinformation.