Reply to Devastating NYT article - please vaccinate your kids

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I appreciate both the utterly heartbreaking NYTimes story and the comment from the poster above who was unvaccinated as a child.

I am a public health scientist with a specific focus on vaccines and vaccine messaging. Many parents who do not vaccinate their children genuinely believe that they are preventing a horrendous outcome for their children like the one mentioned in the NYT article - that is, they possess an unshakeable, visceral, underlying belief that their kid could end up paralyzed or even dead from a vaccine. The terror is all-consuming, even if it is not grounded in the evidence. (There are also more moderate types of parents who opt out of specific vaccines, but I’m thinking less about them here since the public ire is more often directed at the former, and the former is more likely to truly endanger kids by forgoing *all* vaccines).

I make a point not to cut off people close to me when I hear them expressing doubts or fears about vaccines. I say something along the lines of “I know you’re the kid’s parent, and I cannot decide for you. I hear your fears. But I am going to tell you my strong opinion - and also my real-life actions - based on the decades I have spent *actually doing the research* on this. Please consider it.”

I also acknowledge real areas of disagreement or uncertainty in vaccine science and explain how we’ve arrived at current recs based on those. Frankly some vaccines are much more effective than others. I universally emphasize how critical the measles vaccine is given how unbelievably contagious measles is and the strong safety track record of the vax.

Much of my previous work on stories of change re: vaccine perceptions has found that people are much more likely to actually change their *views* when exposed to peer pressures from trusted people (family, friends, elders) in their immediate circles, from listening to their doctors, or from having a scary personal firsthand experience with an illness. Mandates are an important and crucial enforcement mechanism but actually changing minds and having conversations with people is a whole other thing.[/quote]

I am a physician and a parent and I appreciate your work. I’m sure the irony is not lost on you that our world needs both scientists like yourself and public health efforts to make vaccines more widely available to receptive populations in third world countries. Even those efforts have a murky history (rotavirus).

For parents who feel a genuine fear of horrendous outcomes after vaccination, I wish there was a Hollywood blockbuster or alsome way to aptly describe the absolute terror that parents felt in the 50’s, at the height of polio infections in the U.S., and the worry that pregnant women faced in the 60’s, at the height of miscarriages due to rubella and congenital rubella syndrome.

The U.S. decision to mandate rubella vaccination is something that would have never happened today. A disease that was mild in children and adults and was asymptomatic half the time, and otherwise lasted just a few days with a low fever and a rash, would be scoffed at by the current administration. But if a pregnant woman catches rubella in the first trimester, she has a high chance of miscarriage. And if she doesn’t miscarry, her child has a high chance of congenital rubella syndrome, which causes cognitive and sensory defects.

Can you imagine, we were once a country that decided to protect a vulnerable segment of our population enough to mandate vaccination against an otherwise harmless disease? I miss that country. [/quote]

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