My How To Guide on Childhood Vaccine Education

I was talking to a friend not too long ago and the topic of childhood vaccines surfaced. She regretted not being more informed about starting the vaccine schedule with her son son and wished she had done some research before agreeing to the schedule with her pediatrician. The information I am going to share in this post is for anyone who might be wondering if adhering to the schedule is the right choice for their child. It's important for me to state that there is no right or wrong when it comes to this topic - there is only information and how much of it you have when making your decision.

I am not going to pretend to be an expert, a doctor, or the patron saint of motherhood because I chose not to vaccinate my child. The health and wellbeing of your child is up to you and what you think is best for them. I don’t judge any parent who decides for or against the vaccine schedule for their child/ren when they have come to that decision with informed consent. If you have the necessary information to make an informed decision, then I respect that decision no matter what it is.

When my friend and I had our chat, she mentioned feeling overwhelmed about where to even start to get informed about the childhood vaccine schedule and asked me what information I looked at when I made my decision. This blog post is not intended to be in depth on every single topic that I considered but more of a roadmap on what my education and research journey looked like. I will take more time in subsequent blog posts to discuss each topic in more detail but for now I plan to just outline what information and sources I used to educate myself and come to my decision.

I first started getting curious about the childhood vaccine schedule when I found out I was pregnant. I immediately started to think of all of the things in the future I would have to tackle, the excitement and fears. One of those fears was the childhood vaccine schedule. I have personally always avoided injections as much as possible myself for a variety of reasons. This was also the era of post-covid vaccine mandates and seeing how the Covid-19 vaccine was handled, the lack of information around it, the fears the medical community and media spread over not getting it, and the outright lies spewed about it’s efficacy made me wonder about all of the other vaccines on the market for adults and for children. This is where my research story begins.

As I mentioned before, this is more of an overview of the path I took to get information not so much about the specific information itself (all of which is fairly easily locatable).

Topic 1: The Viruses

                  My first step was to go through statistics of each illness on the schedule one by one. The information I considered included infection rates (by age group and over a span of years), methods of transmission, hospitalization rates, and death rates. My goal was to assess this information and determine the risk this illness posed to my child and his likelihood of exposure. Nearly all of this data was obtained from the CDC and NIH websites.

Topic 2: The Vaccine Schedule

I also looked at the growth and expansion of the vaccine schedule since its inception and compared that with the vaccine schedule and disease rates of other first world countries. We aren’t the only westernized society in the world, so it was important for me to compare other countries who operated similarly. There are a variety of first world countries that offer a more limited schedule, begin the schedule later in childhood, and space the injections out in wider intervals compared to the US. I used a variety of sources for this information including the WHO.

Topic 3: VAERS

                  It is estimated that only roughly 5% of adverse events are reported to VAERS and both providers and patients can report. It’s not exceptionally common for either party to utilize the reporting database for a multitude of reasons. For providers, it’s not a requirement to report so the doctor would have to do so out of their own volition which isn’t very likely. Doctors are most often exceptionally busy and manage a large panel of patients, especially pediatricians and family medicine providers. Their time is spent seeing patients, billing insurance companies and patients, and on admin functions like charting and scheduling, so they typically don’t have ample time in the day to write out adverse actions and report it. Patients often don’t because they don’t know or understand the VAERS system, and they often don’t connect adverse reactions to vaccines. With all that being said, there are still thousands and thousands of cases reported on the database. You can use a variety of filters including age, gender, race, location, etc. It’s also important to note that because anyone can report to VAERS the data may not be always 100% accurate or complete.

Topic 4: Other Resources

                  One of the resources I referred to often was Just the Inserts. She has a website, a social media page (on Instagram) and has recently written a book! Her information is exceptionally unbiased and easy to understand. Her focus and priority are on informed consent, period. She has a wealth of information outside of the vaccine schedule, but her resources teach you how to read inserts, understanding what informed consent is and its importance, as well as alternatives to medications and treatments.

                  Another resource I used was RootsofProgress.org. This website contained a wealth of information (all cited) about the effects of sanitation development on lowering disease spreading before the advent of vaccines.

Topic 5: The National Vaccine Injury Act of 1986

                  This topic was important to me because I admit that it does give me pause when the government decides to provide legal immunity to pharmaceutical companies for their products and also absolves them of any financial responsibility for any adverse reactions experienced by their products. Essentially, the NVICP is a no fault alternative to the traditional legal system that allows victims to petition for some sort of compensation for vaccine related injuries or death while absolving the pharmaceutical manufacturer of any responsibility. Why would our government offer protections to corporations offering a medical product and not the citizens they are sworn to protect? And why not protect all medical products from legal liability if they're going to protect the corporations and not the people ?

This act established the following:

1.        The national vaccine Program which set forth specific guidelines around research, development, and procurement and production of vaccines.

2.        Created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program which grants US District Courts the authority to determine eligibility of compensation. Prohibits awards for punitive damages, limits awards to $250,000 and paid exclusively from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund (not paid by the pharma companies themselves).

3.        Protects vaccine manufacturers from liability in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death.

This information was obtained directly from congress.gov website.

Topic 6: Adjuvant Education

                  This is arguably one of the most important topics, in my opinion. Understanding the ingredients that go into the vaccines and their potential effects on our body is so important. To me, it really is less about the virus strain itself and more about the ingredients added to the vaccine to help elicit an immune response in the body. I read through a variety of research papers discussing the topic of adjuvants and one that I found particularly informational was Aluminum Vaccine Adjuvants: Are they Safe? By Tomljenovic and Shaw. It discusses aluminum being a neurotoxin and the limited information about its use in vaccines. There is information out there on the topic of adjuvants, you just have to find it.  

Topic 7: Provider Knowledge on Vaccines

                  What I have found is that very limited time is spent on vaccine education in general in medical school. Studies of universities across the globe clearly identify that most med school programs do not adequately prepare their students to have educated and informational conversations with their patients about vaccine risks, side effects, efficacy, etc. Most providers do not even know all of the ingredients in the vaccines let alone any testing that may or may not have occurred with these ingredients. It is important for a doctor to provide informed consent to their patients but if they are not being adequately prepared to have these conversations how much informed consent are they really providing?

Conclusion

I spent weeks searching for and reading this information. I am no sort of expert in vaccines or illnesses. I simply was a mom looking for information to find the right path forward for my child. I came to my own conclusion just as I expect any mom or parent to come to theirs for the best interest of their child. In my opinion there is risk either way – vaccine or no vaccine. You just have to decide as a parent what risk is acceptable for you.

I'll conclude this post with this:

It doesn’t take much searching to realize just how little data and research we have on the side effects of vaccines and adjuvants. Every child is different and a question that I have that we have yet to be able to answer is:

Is there something in our genetics that makes some children more or less susceptible to vaccine side effects? Why do some children seem to be completely unaffected while others experience mild side effects such as fever and swelling at the injection site and yet others experience significant side effects including seizures, developmental delays, and death? We haven’t been able to answer these questions yet and it doesn’t even appear that anyone is trying to. Why is that?