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I spoke with Sean O’Leary, a specialist of pediatric infectious diseases and a professor at the University of Colorado, whose expertise is vaccines and vaccine communication. He told me that when he has conversations with parents who are hesitant about immunizations, he keeps in mind that they are just trying to figure out what is best for their kids.
A similar approach could help people who aren’t medical professionals who want to help loved ones. Here’s how to respond to 10 common vaccine concerns.
“I don’t need to vaccinate my kids because the chance of contracting the disease is so low.”
As O’Leary explained, “The chance of getting the disease is so low because we vaccinate.” Many diseases have been eliminated because of vaccinations, but this won’t last if population immunity goes down. Not vaccinating could put your child and others around them at risk.
“Natural immunity is better than immunity from vaccination.”
This is “just simply incorrect,” O’Leary said, because “the diseases themselves are so severe and the vaccines are incredibly safe.”
He shares with parents that when he began training in the late ’90s, he treated many kids who had to be hospitalized for rotavirus, a then-common gastrointestinal ailment. Most were fine after hydration, but some children died from it. Since the rotavirus vaccine was widely adopted, he hardly ever sees kids hospitalized with this disease. Another vaccine introduced in recent decades is the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine, which has substantially decreased rates of pneumonia and meningitis in kids.
“Vaccines don’t go through the rigorous testing of other medicines.”
This is wrong. In fact, vaccines are held to a much higher safety standard than other medicines because they are used to prevent rather than treat disease.
“When we treat diseases, we’ll tolerate some side effects,” O’Leary told me. Someone who has heart disease or diabetes will accept some side effects if it helps control their illness. But with vaccines, because they are used in healthy people who do not have the illness, there are even more stringent safety standards.
Vaccines must go through multiple levels of approval by the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and they are also subject to a robust safety surveillance system to detect rare side effects. Routine childhood immunizations have been around for decades, and millions of children in the United States and globally have safely received them.
“I don’t trust the FDA or CDC.”
O’Leary, of course, trusts federal health officials, but he recognizes that some people might not. In those cases, he advises them to consult resources such as their local children’s hospital and university or to speak with their pediatrician or family doctor.
“I don’t trust science.”
This is tough, O’Leary concedes. One possible approach he suggests is to ask whether they take any medicine or use electronics such as a smartphone.
“The phone in your hand is built on decades of science,” he said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense” to treat vaccines differently from other scientific developments.
“Vaccines could cause autism.”
“That’s a very unfortunate example of something that has no basis in science,” O’Leary told me. “That myth has been disproven many, many times, yet it still persists.”
With some families, O’Leary finds it helpful to go into the details of how the myth started — a 1998 paper spearheaded by a man named Andrew Wakefield. But that study was retracted because of serious scientific flaws. Wakefield was subsequently exposed for deliberately perpetuating disinformation for financial gain. Crucially, many other studies have since proved that there is no association between immunizations and autism.
“Someone I know has a child who developed [negative consequence].”
A personal anecdote that elicits an emotional response can be hard to respond to. “The thing we try to point out is that association does not equal causation,” O’Leary said. “Just because something happened after something else doesn’t mean it was causative.” It can help to bring up again the safety surveillance systems that rigorously evaluates reports of possible associations.
“My child had a bad reaction with another vaccine, so I’m holding off on more.”
Just because your child had a reaction to one vaccine doesn’t mean they will have the same to another. O’Leary also assures parents that more pronounced side effects such as fever or soreness at the injection site are signs that the immune system is responding appropriately. That means if their child encounters the disease in the future, they will have immunity to it.
“I’m not saying no to vaccines forever, just delaying them until my child is older and more robust.”
Most diseases that we vaccinate for are most severe for the youngest children. That’s why the vaccine schedule starts in infancy. By waiting, O’Leary tells parents, “you are leaving your children at risk for infections at the time of their highest risk.”
“Vaccines are against my religion.”
“There really aren’t organized religions of any size that object to vaccination,” O’Leary explained. In fact, many urge vaccinations as part of adherents’ duties to safeguard those around them, especially the most vulnerable.
As loud as some anti-vaccine voices can be, they are a tiny minority. “Less than 1 percent of kids in the United States are completely unvaccinated,” O’Leary said. Of these, a substantial proportion come from families that haven’t eschewed immunizations but lack access to medical care.
That means the vast majority of parents are choosing to vaccinate their children. “Many of those folks feel pretty strongly, and we don’t hear from them enough,” he said.
O’Leary urges those who feel passionate about vaccines to get involved with their local immunization coalition. Other advocacy venues include Voices for Vaccines and Immunize.org. It’s not only health-care providers who can share their expertise; everyone can explain why they decided to vaccinate their kids and why vaccines protect us and everyone around us.
