Can you imagine a child getting sick or harmed from your refusal to protect them?  How about the observation that routine childhood immunizations may reduce the risk of leukemia? [1]

The process by which vaccines are developed, tested and introduced is rigorous and designed to ensure safe and effective protection against infectious diseases.  Nevertheless, some parents still do not trust that effort—either they refuse or they delay immunizations.  But, the risk of the disease harming their child is much greater than the risk from giving the vaccine; in addition, the risk to the community is real, as well—illness, time out of school or work for the caretakers, and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It comes as no surprise that the parents of unvaccinated children are more likely to be highly educated; they are living in households enjoying annual incomes of more than $75,000; they say that physicians, public health sources and the government have little influence over their decisions to immunize; and, they often believe that their children have little susceptibility to vaccine-preventable infections. [2] In a word, they are "skeptical."

In some areas of the country, despite efforts to make vaccines available to ALL children, immunization rates are not where they should be.  This has resulted in the reoccurrences of contagious, possibly dangerous diseases that were once thought to have been eliminated, for example measles and mumps or rotavirus (which causes diarrhea and is the leading reason an infant is hospitalized in their first 6 months of life.) [3]

To further make our point, in what health care practitioners call a "work-up" of a child with a simple, yet ever so scary fever seizure, a doctor's comfort level is raised when he or she learns the child is fully immunized.  In such situations, they are less likely to require a spinal tap, an invasive procedure or other extraordinary studies. [4]

Jeffrey Gene Kaplan, MD, MS; Marcy L. Catauro, LPN

1. "Routine childhood vaccines may reduce leukemia risk." Infectious Diseases in Children. March 2011
2. "Childhood Immunization Policies and the Prevention of Communicable Disease." Pediatric Annals. March 2011, 40:3.
3. "Hospitalizations, deaths keep declining after rotavirus vaccine introduction." Infectious Diseases in Children. March 2011
4. "Guideline aims to streamline simple febrile seizure analysis." Pediatrics. (Subcommittee on Febrile Seizures) 2011;127:389-394

Pertaining to Immunizations, What's the "Perfect Storm of Fear"?

Regarding Dr. Hilleman who first created the Measles vaccine, he was obsessed with not only effectiveness, but also and always with safety.  So "it came as a bitter surprise toward the end of his life when his vaccine was at the center of what Dr. Offit called “a perfect storm of fear.” In 1998, The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, published an article alleging that M.M.R. had caused an epidemic of autism.

The lead author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, became a media celebrity, and some parents began to balk at having their children immunized; the vaccine’s very success had made them forget just how devastating measles, mumps and rubella could be. Dr. Hilleman, who might reasonably have been expected to win a Nobel Prize, got hate mail and death threats instead.

Multiple independent studies would eventually demonstrate that there is no link between M.M.R. and autism, and Dr. Wakefield’s work has been widely discredited. In 2010, the British medical authorities stripped him of the right to practice medicine, and The Lancet retracted the 1998 article."  

 "A Forgotten Pioneer of Vaccines"  NY Times May 6, 2013