Parents are just trying to do what’s best for their kids. Here’s how to help them.
You’re reading The Checkup With Dr. Wen, a newsletter on how to navigate covid-19 and other public health challenges., prompting many readers to ask how they should respond if a family member or friend expresses skepticism toward routine childhood immunizations., a specialist of pediatric infectious diseases and a professor at the University of Colorado, whose expertise is vaccines and vaccine communication.
He shares with parents that when he began training in the late ’90s, he treated many kids who had to be hospitalized for rotavirus, a then-common gastrointestinal ailment. Most were fine after hydration, but some children died from it. Since the rotavirus vaccine was widely adopted, he hardly ever sees kids hospitalized with this disease. Another vaccine introduced in recent decades is the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine, which has substantially decreased rates ofThis is wrong.
“The phone in your hand is built on decades of science,” he said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense” to treat vaccines differently from other scientific developments.“That’s a very unfortunate example of something that has no basis in science,” O’Leary told me. “That myth has been disproven many, many times, yet it still persists.”With some families, O’Leary finds it helpful to go into the details of how the myth started — a 1998 paper spearheaded by a man named Andrew Wakefield.
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