>Vaccination Nation
>As promised, I wrote about the great vaccination debate in this week’s Nashville Scene edition of Suburban Turmoil. Thank you all so much for sharing your opinions and stories with me. They were illuminating and scary and fascinating and truly, I am now more alarmed than ever. It’s not your fault; it’s simply the byproduct of being a parent in the Information Age. The more I know, the more I worry. Ugh.
Here’s the full text of the column…
Shortly before my first child was born, strange and alarming emails started showing up in my inbox. My father, a doctor, was the author of these missives, which included attachments with scholarly articles warning about the potential dangers of the infant vaccination schedule. He bandied about words such as “autism,” “serious injury” and “death.” If he was trying to scare the shit out of me, he succeeded. After having a minor panic attack over the impending doom facing my newborn baby, I knew I had to do something drastic.
“She looks great,” our doctor said a few months later, during my daughter’s 2-week-old wellness checkup. She was one of the most respected pediatricians in town, and I had practically agreed to donate a kidney just to get an appointment with her. “Now, today, she’s due for a few vaccinations and….”
“Actually, I’d like to stagger her shots,” I said. The pediatrician sighed. “Let me go and get something,” she said, as if she’d dealt with moms like me many, many times before. “I’ll be right back.” A few minutes later, she returned with photocopies in her hands. “I’d like you to read over this information,” she said, speaking slowly and loudly so that my feeble brain could process what she was saying. “I’ll wait. As you’ll see, the vaccinations are perfectly safe.”
I looked down at the sheets, written so that a fifth-grader could understand them and heavily illustrated with drawings of smiling mothers, fathers and babies.
“I’ve done the research,” I said hesitantly. “I’ve read a lot about the shots and I want to stagger them.”
She smiled thinly. “I follow the schedule set by the American Academy of Pediatrics,” she said. “And I hate to say, ‘It’s my way or the highway,’ but….” she shrugged. “If you don’t want to follow the AAP schedule, you’ll just have to find another doctor.”
Oh God. I clutched my infant to my chest, feeling like I was in the principal’s office, about to be expelled from school. “OK,” I squeaked, tears welling in my eyes. As my husband and I trudged out, I wondered forlornly how my baby would survive, pediatricianless, in this pertussis-ridden world.
Despite the melodrama, we managed to find a pediatrician who easily agreed to stagger my daughter’s shots, but that incident was my personal introduction to a subject that makes otherwise dignified parents and doctors foam at the mouth. Remember the Sharks and the Jets? Well, they’ve got nothing on the Vaccinators and the Staggerers. Just ask my Internet readers, who brandished their opinions like nunchucks when I broached the subject on my Suburban Turmoil blog.
“You better believe my son gets his shots on schedule,” wrote Liz. “I had whooping cough as a child, and I will never ever forget how horrible it was. Not to mention chicken pox. Not to mention reading about the polio epidemic of 1912, the influenza epidemic of 1918, etc.”
“I have a 6-year-old with autism,” countered Misty. “He had the MMR [vaccination] at 18 months, had a seizure that night from a high fever, within three weeks he lost all speech, all fine motor skills and some gross motor skills. I believe whole heartedly that the vaccine caused it. I have two other children who I will not vaccinate.”
“I know some of the world’s leading vaccine authorities,” wrote a Vanderbilt doctor, “and can tell you that if they believed a vaccine was harmful they would…champion it not being given. They are parents too.”
“I believe in the good that vaccines have done, but I don’t believe that it’s necessary to pump small children full of numerous vaccines at once,” asserted Kat. “They CAN be safely staggered, we’ve done it with our 3-year-old and he’s as healthy as can be.”
I took an informal poll and, of 300 parents who responded, more than one in four reported either staggering their children’s vaccinations or not vaccinating at all. And that’s not good. I mean, I may stagger my kids’ shots, but I sure as hell don’t want to think that a fourth of the children my precious darlings play with in the YMCA nursery haven’t had all of theirs. For all I know, their scabs and runny noses are the end result of an extended vacation to Timbuktu and a rare strain of tsetse-itis.
The whole thing just gives me one more reason to lie awake at night, obsessing over lead paint on toys and dangerous chemicals in cans of formula and whether microwaved baby bottles contain carcinogens and, now, vaccinations. Parenting is the new Russian roulette, and we spin that chamber of choices wondering if this time, we’ll land on diphtheria. Or autism. Or cancer. Or E. coli.
Really, it’s a wonder my kids have survived at all.
>Hi,I’m the one who couldn’t get your post for the last week or so, well, now I can.Cheekwood!! I used to live in Columbia and we’d drive up once or twice a year and visit Cheekwood. My goal now (45 years later) is to get an art history degree and live at Cheekwood as curator.Thanks for the memory,Jenny
>My Dad just sent me the most startling statistic I believe I have ever heard. Turns out that 100%, that’s right- 100%, of people who have ever eaten a carrot eventually died. Why are Dads so interested in grim news? Why?
>1. You build a right fine article, Lindsay. Well done.2. Seems to me that your generation has more to worry about with vaccinations, than mine seemed to have to. I got all those vaccinations, I turned out aflkahgfil…3. Amy, it ain’t only carrots: scientific research definitively proves that anyone who’s ever eaten creamed corn — even if just once — will die at the end of their lifetime. No exceptions. Also true of corn…peas…beans…beets…especially beets…ack.
>You can die sooner from Beets and Brussel Sprouts, that is if you’re the cook in our house.
>Ahh,But do you flu shot?
>Here is a link to a brilliant blog post on the subject of vaccines/autism, if anyone is interested in reading further: http://www.nakedauthors.com/2008/03/shot-in-dark.html
>Ugh. I just had my son’s shots today. I have stuck to the schedule, although it seems my doctor might stagger them a bit to not have so many at one time. It makes me SO FREAKING MAD that I even have to WONDER about this crap. How can one side be so “YOUR CHILD WILL LIVE A TERRIBLE LIFE” and the other be so “Who? What? It’s fine.”. WHAT THE HELL.
>Thanks for quoting me in the article.Regarding vaccines, (just to rehash) they are safe and reduce (and sometimes prevent) the likelyhood of getting serious infectious diseases that can seriously harm, or kill you. There is no science proving that staggering harms or helps. The biggest benefit of staggering is that it gives the mother the feeling of some element of control in the face of CDC/Dept. Ed. Guidelines, etc. The biggest drawbacks are that it drags out the number of doctor visits and will decrease the likelyhood that the child will get all their shots (because we do forget to follow up, etc…) and the child will associate the pediatrician’s office with shots. Regarding autism, I personally think that overall, the autism/vaccine link is false at best and idiosyncratic at worst. Maybe a rare group of individuals with a to yet be determined genetic predisposition (mitochondrial DNA mutation, or whatever) may be at risk. Perhaps if that link could be worked out, we can look for that genetic fingerprint in the future. Again, there is a huge Center for Personalized Medicine at Vanderbilt trying to compare genes to diseases. This might be one for them to investigate in collaboration with their outstanding vaccine research team.As I have previously lauded investigators, pediatricians and our friends in the pharmaceutical industry have truly have patient interests in mind. I have interviewed for several industry positions in my time and have found the people I potentially could have worked for to be amongst the most ethical. They believe in their mission and it is in the best interest of patients and their bottom line to pull the plug on a drug or vaccine as early in the pipeline as possible, and they have a history of doing so. You hear the horror stories in the news, but I would trust a Pharma executive more than I do lawyers or other industrialists. They have a higher standard to uphold (with the FDA, etc.) and many of them are MD’s who did take the Hippocratic oath.
>PS – For folks concerned about Autism and Immunizations, there is a lecture at VanderbiltEric Fombonne, M.D.March 31st 4:10 PM.Room 241 Kennedy Center/MRL BuildingReception to follow (Chardonnay anyone?).Call 322-8240 for details.
>Thank you beautiful Lindsay for sharing info with those who read your column.You’re a good mama and a good friend to the autism community. 🙂
>Thanks for quoting me, Lindsey! Loved the article.Darth Doc, people might have more faith in the process of vaccine approval if there wasn’t so much conflict of interest on the panel. There really should be no members with ties to Big Pharma on the panel that approves Big Pharma’s vaccines. Vaccines that are harmful have been approved by the FDA and then pulled from the market before. The FDA is an overtaxed, understaffed government agency…I’ve worked with them in a professional capacity and I’m sorry but for anyone to put their faith in them is foolish. We all have to do our own research and make our own decisions. Sorry, didn’t mean to hijack the comments!
>Kat,Obviously the FDA, or any other agency isn’t perfect. Of course vaccines and other drugs get pulled after being approved. A side effect or problem missed in 100,000 studied subjects during the approval process may be missed until you have 10,000,000 exposures to the drug. But those drugs ARE pulled at that time. And while parents should be informed, sometimes they don’t have the savvy, or only read what gels with their agenda. It would take about over 1 and closer to 10 million subjects to have the power to ask the question, “Does staggering vaccines reduce the risk of autism and does it have no effect on protecting from the diseases one is immunized for?” I will bet you that most doctors that are against staggering vaccines fear that patients will be lost to follow up, miss a shot, etc. If you won’t miss a visit, 1 in 10 other moms will. It doesn’t put the doctor out. They won’t even see the kid on “shot day” if shots are staggered. The fact is, a large number of the medications and vaccines we have either save or improve lives. All drugs have side effects and risks. The risks have to outweigh the benefits. I would never take a medication with Cancer Chemo side effects for an allergy problem. But chemo is acceptable when the alternative is death. The problem with vaccines is that people do not see the illnesses we vaccinate for, or they are much more mild. The second problem is that what someone else decides for their child (no vaccines, staggering) impacts my child as vaccinations aren’t perfect and an outbreak caused by a few non-vaccinated kids who get very sick is more likely to result in affecting immunized kids than if the whole “safety net” of everyone vaccinating isn’t maintained. So there are societal implications.Risk is out there for all of us regardless of what decision we make. I have the privilege of knowing individuals involved with the FDA, in industry, in academia and even on the front lines of medicine. Certainly an overwhelming majority of them have peoples best interest at heart. As I said before, a higher percentage than in any other business or calling. I probably get a little touchy about issues like this, but when folks in the media/blogosphere/coffee klatch circles etc…have their notions and the research that they have access to differs from what I have access to, I am a mite fearful of the implications.At least with the Circumcision issue (sorry Lindsay) it’s personal. Vaccination has bigger implications beyond one kid, or one family.