Immunizations

Immunizations

Today, most children in the United States lead much healthier lives and parents live with much less anxiety and worry over infections during childhood. Immunizations are one of the success stories of modern medicine. Parents often wonder if vaccinations are worth putting their young child through the distress of receiving vaccinations or the potential side effects. The answer from the vast majority of medical experts is a resounding “yes.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommend that healthy children get vaccinated against 14 diseases by age 2 (with boosters later for some), along with an annual inoculation against the flu. The government supports vaccines so strongly that any uninsured child can walk into a clinic and get their shots for free.

Despite doctors’ reassurances and mounting evidence that underscores the safety and value of vaccination, many educated, dedicated parents are still wary of vaccines or strongly opposed to them. Although the national immunization rate has remained stable over the past decade (76 percent of children ages 19 to 35 months were up-to-date on all of their shots in 2008), that’s still short of the government’s goal of 80 percent. In some parts of the United States, a rising number of parents are delaying shots for their children or skipping certain ones altogether, citing religious or philosophical exemptions from state laws that require children to be vaccinated in order to attend school. As a result, there have been recent outbreaks of serious diseases that vaccines had virtually wiped out in the U.S., including measles, mumps, pertussis (whooping cough), and haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), which was once the most common cause of bacterial meningitis in children under 5 (CDC).

What scares parents most about the inoculations is that there are some who believe that their child’s autism was caused by immunizations. Some believe that the increased number of vaccines are to blame for the rise in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The idea first made headlines in 1998, when Andrew Wakefield, M.D., a British gastroenterologist, published a study of 12 children in The Lancet that linked the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) combination vaccine with intestinal problems that he believed led to autism. The following year, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a warning about thimerosal, the mercury-containing preservative that was found in most vaccines. Though it didn’t mention autism specifically, it suggested that the use of vaccines with thimerosal could theoretically push an infant’s total exposure of mercury, a neurotoxin, above safe limits, and it recommended that the preservative be removed from shots. The vaccine-autism hypothesis was solidly in the mainstream by the time actress Jenny McCarthy went public with her belief that vaccines caused her son’s autism, describing in heartbreaking detail how “the soul left his eyes” on a 2007 segment of the The Oprah Show.

Caregivers can rest assured, however, since at least seven large studies in major medical journals have now found no association between the MMR vaccine and ASD and The Lancet officially retracted Dr. Wakefield’s original paper. In March, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, Office of Special Masters, a group of judges appointed to handle cases of families who believe immunizations were responsible for their child’s autism, ruled that thimerosal in vaccines does not increase the risk of the disorder. Several demographic analyses have also found that autism rates continued to rise even after thimerosal was removed from all vaccines except some flu shots (AAP, 2018).

Any association of ASD characteristics emergence with the timing of vaccines is almost certainly coincidental. Children get their first dose of the MMR vaccine at 12 to 15 months, the age at which autism symptoms typically become noticeable. Some autism activists now believe that we shouldn’t even be performing more studies about a possible vaccine connection because they take attention and money away from important research that is investigating other potential causes of the disorder which has reached alarming numbers in the past decade.

Document: CDC Recommended Immunizations for Children from Birth Through 6 Years Old