This year over Thanksgiving break, I got my annual flu shot. I wouldn’t exactly call it a pleasant excursion; getting jabbed with a needle by a brusque woman in a lab coat never really fit my idea of fun, but there I was, sleeve rolled up, trying to stay still and resist the urge to twist away and just focus on the lollipop I would be rewarded with afterwards.

Maybe it’s because I have a doctor for a parent, but getting vaccinated against preventable diseases always seemed like common sense. Yet every year, people bring up the thoroughly debunked “study” that claimed vaccines cause autism. Jenny McCarthy finds some platform to turn her celebrity status into a weapon and tell impressionable parents not to vaccinate their children (seriously, someone needs to tell that woman her fifteen minutes were up in 1998).

I get it, to an extent; science is hard. People fear what they don’t understand. But how can you hear about yearly cases of children getting seriously ill and not want to do something about it?

After a whole twenty minutes of Googling, I was able to learn a few things about vaccines. For instance, the people most likely to die from a vaccine preventable illness are babies. At young ages, kids rely on “herd immunity,” meaning that if everyone around them has the correct vaccines, they’ll be fine. Which is why I’m kind of horrified that children too young to be vaccinated are contracting diseases from people who refused vaccines. Yet every year, about 8,000 people die from whooping cough (aka Pertussis), a disease whose vaccine has been on the CDC-recommended schedule for years. The vast majority of these people were babies and the elderly – people whose immune systems are, to put it plainly, pretty sucky.

I know, I know. You’re worried about side effects. But do a modicum of research and you’ll find that you’re more likely to contract a preventable illness if you refuse a vaccine than you are to have a serious side effect if you take one.

I’m not saying vaccines are perfect. Heck, last year I got the flu shot and still contracted the flu (during finals, no less). But at the very least, vaccines soften the blow a virus can do to your system. At most, you’ll totally fight off a potentially serious disease without breaking a sweat.

Seriously, you guys. Just get the shots.