My daughter informed me recently that she was simply going to follow the recommended schedule for vaccinations for my granddaughter. She was a little nervous, thinking I might disapprove.
If she had to simply pick a side and follow their recommendations, which I think is what many new parents decide, she picked the right side! I let her know that while I would support whatever decisions she might have made, this one was easy to support.
I can certainly understand her concern. It is not easy to process all the information. As a child, she watched her father and I discuss the different vaccines and whether or not to get her and her brother vaccinated. As a parent, she discovered she didn't trust the sources that she could understand and couldn't understand the sources she could trust.
As a statistician, I tended to concentrate on trying to minimize the total risks involved. Especially after I came to the conclusion that the risks of adverse reactions given by the manufacturer were best taken as a minimum for a confidence interval.
For my daughter, and any other young parents who worry about all the different vaccines available today, here are the three heuristics I used to come to my decisions.
There were two main aspects of disease I considered when making vaccination decisions for my children: How serious is the disease and how contagious is it. Diseases that are both serious and easily caught are a clear vaccinate choice. For example, measles was a no-brainer for me to choose vaccination. Even if it's not common here and now, that can change so rapidly!
Chicken pox, on the other hand, I didn't see any real hurry to get my child vaccinated for that when it first came out. Chicken pox is quite an unpleasant disease after puberty though, so having never contracted chicken pox, I had my kids vaccinated for that at around 10 or 12.
I see no point to getting a young child vaccinated for a disease that is primarily transmitted sexually unless there is reason to think your child is at an increased risk of contracting it. At puberty I recommend discussing it with your child and letting them know about both the disease and other risks of unprotected sex. I would allow my adolescent to make the final call on the vaccine because that makes it clear that they are old enough to have autonomy over their body and make such decisions for themselves.
The only other aspect I gave much consideration to was the newness of the vaccine recommendation. Sadly, I lost faith in the ACIP recommendations back in the 90's when the committee seemed to me to be a very biased group. It appears better now, but there are always unknown risks when a vaccine is first introduced to a large and diverse population. This risk should be quite low, but as a parent, I found I preferred to wait a few years to make sure that any unforeseen problems could be identified, evaluated and appropriate corrective action taken if needed. Examples of such problems are the recommendation followed by retraction of the rotovirus vaccine back in 1999.
That's about it. All in all, I think vaccines and the corresponding elimination of so much human suffering and death is one of the greatest achievements of mankind.
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