Childhood Vaccines
A mildly critical take...
A few years before the COVID episode began, my wife informed me that she was pregnant with our third child. Beginning a couple years prior to that, we had begun to think much more critically about our health decisions. I came from a family full of chronic illness, and had myself suffered from severe digestive problems. By the time I was 21, I walked around at about 145lbs (I am 5’9”). In an effort to get this under control, I started reading about how physical health was, by definition, a holistic metric. Over time, through experimentation, I cut out processed sugars, refined flours, synthetic preservatives, and anything with ingredients on the food label I couldn’t pronounce. I started lifting weights and running, and spending more time outside. Sure enough, I began to get better until eventually I was stocky and strong and could run several miles without tiring. To me, it seemed unbelievable.
In hindsight, these results seem painfully predictable. But it is important for the reader to remember that there was a time when Super Size Me was an absolutely revelatory film to most of the country. Growing up in the Midwest, the only person I ever knew who didn’t think that chronic illnesses were just random, unlucky events outside of your control by way of genetic happenstance was my crunchy uncle who had left for Southern California in the late 1980s. My improvement had changed this for me. By the mid 2010s, I had begun to get into the habit of asking simple questions regarding my health and that of my family’s. I was still not terribly skeptical of the medical establishment, and frankly couldn’t have articulated that it even existed. All I really knew is that I liked my doctor growing up, and he’d been my doctor for my entire childhood.
With this backdrop, I thought to ask a couple simple questions with regard to my son who would arrive in a few months. The first was “which vaccines do the professionals recommend we give him?” The second was “what illnesses are they preventing?” The third was “are there any potential side-effects?” Up until this point, I had never thought to ask any of these questions; after all, vaccination was just what you did to keep your new baby healthy. We vaccinated our first two kids and everything seemed to turn out fine.
To answer the first question, I searched something innocuous like “recommend vaccines for childhood.” The schedule looked like this:
Birth
Hepatitis B
1-2 Months
DTaP
Hib
IPV
PCV
Rotavirus
4 Months
DTaP (dose 2)
Hib (dose 2)
IPV (dose 2)
PCV (dose 2)
6 Months
DTaP (dose 3)
Hib (dose 3)
Hepatitis B (dose 2)
IPV (dose 3)
PCV (dose 3)
Rotavirus (dose 2)
7-11 Months
Influenza
12-23 Months
Chickenpox
DTaP (dose 4)
Influenza
Hepatitis A
Hepatitis B (dose 3)
Hib (dose 4)
IPV (dose 4)
MMR
PCV (dose 4)
2-3 Years
Influenza
4-6 Years
Chickenpox (dose 2)
DTaP (dose 5)
Influenza
MMR (dose 2)
My first thought was something like “wow, that is 31 shots against 14 illnesses by age 6. I don’t remember getting that many.” So, like any good sojourner of the 21st century, I took to Google. “CDC vaccine schedule 1990 (the year I was born),” I searched. Sure enough, I would have received 10 shots against 8 illnesses. Chickenpox was on the list back then too, but in 1990 no self-respecting mother was concerned that her child might die from it, so my mom just left us to get it from our friends. Why the sudden increase? I knew other people with children and, if anything, they seemed slightly sicker and definitely more allergic to things than I remember kids being when I was growing up.
“Fine,” I thought, “if this is what it takes to keep my kid healthy, I’ll do it. But I should probably know what I’m trying to prevent.” I decided I would answer my second initial question: “what illnesses am I vaccinating him against?” Logically, I started with the first vaccine on the schedule, Hepatitis B, and figured I’d move chronologically down the list. First thing was first: what even is Hepatitis B? I had no clue. I turn to Google, again, and the first result is from some broadly-known mainstream health authority like the Cleveland Clinic or NIH – I don’t remember exactly which. It turns out it is a viral infection that creates inflammation in the liver, which of course I don’t want my infant son contracting, so at this point I’m still on board. The follow-on question to this was obviously “well, how would he contract it?” This is where things began to stop making sense for me. There were basically three avenues of transmission of Hepatitis B: sexual contact or sharing intravenous needles with an infected person, or mother-to-child transmission during childbirth. None of these scenarios made any sense to me though, because my wife was tested for Hepatitis B at her first prenatal visit and, of course, the result was negative. Since she was not going to have sex with an infected person (or share intravenous needles with one) before giving birth, there was an actual zero percent chance my child would contract this illness.
At this point, the cognitive dissonance was profound. Why on earth would you inject a baby, only hours old, with a vaccine for an illness he could not contract? I wouldn’t even give a toddler Infant Motrin without having a reason to. Imagine the logic: “Hey honey, Junior is learning to walk now. He could fall and hit his head, and that would hurt. Should we give him Motrin in case it does happen, then he’ll be in less pain afterwards?” I was almost incredulous – surely there had to be a reason. My next thought was the most logical one I could think of: “How long does the immunity last?” Maybe the reasoning was that lifelong immunity might as well be acquired in infancy to ensure maximal lifetime protection. I searched Google again, and once again the answer blew my mind. The first result was the NHS website from the U.K., and it says that immunity “may last 20 years.” “20 years?” I thought, “I’m going to inject my hours-old son with a vaccine to protect against a sexually-transmitted illness he won’t contract in childhood whose immunity wears off around the time he reaches sexual maturity?” I was still convinced that there was no way this is the kind of thing that you’d find when you asked the most basic questions about the vaccines on the CDC’s schedule, so I did more digging.
The next vaccine on the list was DTaP, which I found out stood for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. I had no meaningful idea of what any of these diseases were, so I continued my research. Diphtheria is a virulent bacterial infection that creates a fibrous coating on the throat that can restrict breathing, and whose shed toxins can poison the heart. It was the illness central to the story of Balto, which was a movie I had enjoyed as a child. By all accounts a terrible sickness I would not want my son contracting, only one or two cases per year have occurred in the United States since the 1980s, and all of them were acquired internationally. It also turned out to have an established, effective, and widely-available treatment protocol. And, unlike COVID, it was not spread through respiratory aerosols; this means that if there was, by some incomprehensible anti-miracle, a diphtheria outbreak in the neighborhood, simple quarantine of my infant son would be enough to prevent him from contracting it. All of this information came straight from institutions like the Cleveland Clinic, the NIH, the NHS, the CDC or the WHO. I did not have to dig far to put the pieces together.
Tetanus turned out to be similar; it was basically only contracted by having a puncture wound contaminated by rust, soil or infected saliva – none of which would likely apply to my baby boy. And, even if somehow it did, both the tetanus and diphtheria vaccines could be given as post-exposure prophylactics, meaning they could be administered once exposure had potentially occurred, and would be equally preventative. To further compound my confusion, I discovered that both diphtheria and tetanus boosters are recommended for adults every 10 years. I had never heard a single adult in my life tell me that he or she was going to the doctor for a diphtheria or tetanus booster. I did, however, know a couple adults who had received tetanus shots after stepping on rusty nails. If the wait-until-it-happens approach worked just fine for every adult ever, why would I not follow the same protocol for my son?
Over and over I found the same kinds of answers. Hib was another bacterial pathogen that used to infect over 20,000 young children every year, but has since dropped to less than 50 cases annually and, like diphtheria and tetanus, has a successful post-exposure prophylactic protocol. PCV is intended to prevent pneumonia, which has been around forever and has always been straightforwardly treated with antibiotics. There are certainly serious, antibiotic-resistant strains, but these are more commonly acquired in hospital settings and among otherwise immunocompromised people with significant comorbidities and, it turns out, PCV doesn’t immunize against those anyways. IPV targets polio, and the last case of that acquired in the U.S. was in 1979. Rotavirus is the stomach flu. Hepatitis A is, like COVID, fatal in a vanishingly small number of children who acquire it. Influenza is the flu – we all get that a bunch of times before we hit adulthood. Chickenpox is so unserious that I remember my own mother being glad when it finally hit our house because we wouldn’t get it again after that. MMR stands for “measles, mumps and rubella.” Mumps is probably the most contagious, least treatable and most complicated disease on this list, but is still generally mild in infected children and lasting complications are rare. I found that the CDC’s own data said that <0.02% of infected children will develop encephalitis, the most dangerous of potential side effects. Rubella is typically even milder in young children; both are much worse in adults. Last, but not least, let us not forget that classic episode of The Brady Bunch where the kids were thrilled to contract the measles, because it meant they could stay home from school without being especially sick.
In my search, I never even got to the third of my initial questions: “are there any potential side-effects?” I didn’t feel like I needed to. The collective possibility of my child being disabled or killed by any one of these diseases was smaller than the likelihood a child is killed in a car accident before reaching adulthood. No half-caring parent would stick a single needle into his or her child’s arm knowing there would almost certainly be no measurable benefit, much less 31 of them. Nor would that same parent give a child a dose of Tylenol without reason to believe it would lessen the burden of some ailment. Yet, somehow, when the same institutional apparatus that gave us the deadly Vioxx debacle demands we do just that, all social forces coalesce to corner us into compliance.
Mildly astute readers will notice that I have not said a single thing about autism, adverse events, VAERS, safety studies, or any of the things the Children’s Health Defense crowd typically concerns themselves with. I take no position on those matters in this article. Instead, I asked simple, basic questions regarding the benefit of these shots for my child in our own family’s situation, and the answers I got could not have surprised me more. My calculations could be different if my son was born immunocompromised, or if we lived somewhere with poor sanitation, or if we regularly traveled somewhere one of these diseases was endemic or common. I think there’s a perfectly good argument that the benefit is substantial in occupations where exposure potential is high (i.e. rabies in animal control). If there was a sudden outbreak of diphtheria in my area, and my kids were exposed, I would absolutely vaccinate them post-exposure. If my son stepped on a rusty nail, same thing. But these are situational cost/benefit analyses that are dependent upon specific factors, and relevant to specific circumstances. To take a blanket preventative tactic with almost no measurable benefit to most patients that is immensely profitable to American pharmaceutical companies seemed, at minimum, a sacrifice I wouldn’t be making with my son.
- Warren Post