Alternative Vaccination Schedules

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            More than 1 in 10 parents do not follow the recommended schedule for childhood vaccinations. They delay some vaccines or refuse some vaccinations altogether. There are many reasons that these parents give for their decisions. They feel that it is safer to wait to give vaccinations until the child is older, they distrust the pharmaceutical companies that produce the vaccines or they feel that the risk of side effects from the vaccines is too great. These fears have been well documented to be groundless, but once a rumor like this gets started, it continues to circulate in various forms.. A good example is the belief that measles vaccine caused autism. Even though the Englishman who originated this myth has been totally discredited and multiple studies involving hundreds of thousands of children have proven that there is absolutely no relationship between autism and measles, parents still have different variations of this fear.

            No medical procedure is without risk. One must always balance the risk of a procedure or medication against the risk of the disease With vaccines, the risk of the disease is worse than the risk of the vaccine. In the time before vaccines, diphtheria or pertussis (whooping cough) could infect an entire family and kill all of the children in that family within a couple of weeks. These diseases have not disappeared. Skipping or delaying vaccines has been proven to significantly increase both the risk of getting and the risk of spreading the diseases that can be prevented by vaccines. Unvaccinated children are 22 times more likely to get measles and 6 times more likely to get pertussis. Unvaccinated children also pose a risk to the vaccinated children in a community. A Colorado study showed that for every 1% increase of under-immunized children in a community, the vaccinated children in that community had twice the risk of developing pertussis.

Autism is an emotional disaster for parents that turns their life upside down because their hopes and expectations for their previously normal child have to be readjusted. Whenever this kind of tragedy happens in our lives, it is human nature to want to know why it happened. Modern medicine cannot give these parents a reason for autism and the parents become desperate to know what caused this total change in their life and their child’s life. Unfortunately, other people can use that desperation to promote their own agendas. They are always willing to give reasons and “cures” when scientific medicine cannot. They also give parents the false sense that they can prevent autism if they avoid vaccines or alter the vaccine schedule. Most of us would do anything if we were convinced that it would keep our children safer. The reality is that giving the recommended vaccines on the recommended schedule makes our children safer. Altering those schedules puts our children at greater risk.