The Vaccine Series: Introduction

I know, I know, it's been months without a post. This is what happens when you're a pediatric intern trying to learn all the diseases. And working 12 hour days, 6 days a week really wears on you. I hardly ever feel like reading when I get home, let alone researching for a blog post. But I'm working on it. And given that this is the first anniversary of this blog, I thought it was fitting to pick things back up.

I saw a patient in clinic recently, there for a well visit, who had only seen a doctor once before, shortly after birth. Her parents had refused vaccines in the newborn nursery, and then hadn't seen anyone for the routine 2 month vaccines, and was now showing up for the four month visit. But, parents weren't sure which vaccines they wanted, and they claimed to want to follow Dr. Sears' modified vaccine schedule. So, I got the opportunity to wade through these treacherous waters to see how best to vaccinate this child.

Vaccine refusal, parents who tell us as pediatricians that they do not want to vaccinate their children, is more common than I'd like it. Ideally, all parents would understand the importance of vaccinations, and would follow the CDC schedule without concern. Then maybe we wouldn't see the outbreaks of measles that are currently occurring across the US.

There are some legitimate reasons for not vaccinating. Children with cancer generally cannot receive live vaccines. Other children with impaired immune systems, where they can't fight off certain bugs, may not respond well to vaccines. But for the generally healthy child? There's no overwhelming reason not to vaccinate. Thus, it usually comes down to the parent's ideas about vaccination.

I could spend hours on this topic, going over each of the arguments I've heard. In fact, I've touched on some of them before. In general, parents fall into a handful of categories:

1. Vaccines cause autism.
Without going into all the research, this has been disproven time and time again. But I'll explore the concept more related to the particular vaccine that this is used for: the MMR vaccine.

2. Vaccines contain harmful preservatives, including formaldehyde.
Again, I'll explore this with each individual component, but essentially, it comes down to the fact that the 0.5 mL vaccine contains such a small amount of these preservatives that it is less than an average person consumes in their diet on a day-to-day basis.

3. Vaccines cause disease.
I most often hear this related to the flu vaccine. There's a select few cases where the vaccine does cause disease, and I'll explore those when discussing those particular vaccines. But in general, there's no way for the vaccine to cause disease, because the bug used to create the vaccine has been torn up so much that it doesn't do anything anymore.

4. We are overwhelming our children's immune systems.
The vaccines we use today actually contain less material to stimulate children's immune systems than they did 20 years ago, and they cover more diseases. While not all the vaccines need to be given on the schedule recommended by the CDC, most children do just fine with the schedule, and aren't overwhelmed in the least.

5. The diseases aren't common anymore, so why should I vaccinate my child.
For this, I point out the measles outbreaks, particularly the current one in the Southwest US. These diseases still exist, even if they aren't that common in the US anymore, and we have vaccines because these diseases can be devastating to children. I'll explain more in each of the blogs I post here out.


So, this series is going to go over each of the individual vaccines available. It will be a long series, but in an effort to both learn new things myself, as well as teach others, I want to investigate each vaccine.

If you have any other blanket arguments against vaccines, either from yourself or that you've heard from others, please mention it in the comments, so I can attempt to address it. Maybe you'll convince me that I'm wrong.