• Choosing Vaccines     
• Adverse Effects of Vaccines     
• Legal Requirements and Exemptions     
• Alternative Vaccines

Vaccine Choices
What options are available to parents in their choice about vaccines? First, parents may decide they want less than the total range of recommended vaccines. It comes as a surprise to some parents that they can choose to have one or some vaccines and refuse others. You are responsible for your child’s health. You are in control. If a child suffers a dramatic and tragic reaction to a vaccine, it is the parents who must cope with it. The doctors may be sympathetic, but they are personally uninvolved. They view it merely as a casualty in the war against disease, if they admit any culpability at all.

When would a parent choose to give some vaccines and not others? Simply stated, some vaccines apparently represent a more dangerous threat to the body than others. This is inferred from the types of immediate, short-term reactions that we can observe. We assume that those vaccines with the most dramatic short-term toxicity also pose a more dangerous risk for long-term reactions, though this has not been proven because no one has studied the long-term effects of vaccines.

Given that the long-term risks are unknown, parents usually make choices about individual vaccines based on the history of short-term reactions they have caused. The pertussis, measles, and rubella vaccines tend to cause more significant observable reactions than others, though hepatitis and polio vaccines can also cause serious illness. The most commonly avoided vaccine is pertussis because by now, after more than sixty years of medical reports of horrific reactions (deaths, epilepsy, and retardation) from the whole-cell pertussis vaccine, public fear of the vaccine has mounted. The fact that many other countries have abandoned the pertussis vaccine has strengthened the resolve of many parents to also refuse the vaccine. These parents have held their ground, and many physicians, though they may not take the same position, admit that a parent’s concern about possible reactions may be justified, despite the consistent denial of the American vaccine industry.

Parents can pick and choose from the list of vaccines based on their own individual family’s needs and their own research. They may decide that some diseases pose enough danger to their child to risk the adverse effects of the vaccine. Even a parent who has rejected most vaccines because of their potential adverse effects may choose to give one or a few individual vaccines. Typically, tetanus is a disease that concerns many parents. Since the vaccine causes less immediate severe reactions than others, because the vaccine always works to prevent tetanus, and because tetanus represents a life-threatening situation when it does occur, parents who refuse other vaccines sometimes opt to get the tetanus shots for their child. A parent’s concern may be greater for a very active child, especially around horses, since both these factors increase the risk of wounds and exposure to tetanus. Other families may be considering travel to areas of the world (Asia or Africa) where polio still exists, and they will consider giving that vaccine even if they realize that polio does not occur in their own part of the world.