Alternative Vaccination Schedule?
Can you recommend an online resource which has an easy to follow/understand alternative vaccination schedule from newborns on up?
3 Answers
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We struggled with this as well and it was a very difficult decision to make. As best as I could, I weighed the evidence on both sides and considered an alternate schedule, but eventually came to the conclusion that the CDC-recommended schedule would work for us.
I'm not a scientist and found it difficult to evaluate the studies that have been done on my own. I ended up relying on expert opinion to filter what the studies showed, and in many cases it seemed to me that the anti-vaccination crowd distorted the evidence and presented their "facts" disingenuously. I found this site helpful; it's a reference for vaccine safety information developed by a group of physican/scientist bloggers: http://sciencebasedmedicine.org/reference/category/vaccines/
There was a study done recently to test whether on-time vaccinations vs. a delayed schedule affected neurological outcomes. The study found that delaying vaccinations offered no neurological benefit, based on 42 tests performed between the ages of 7 and 10. (In fact, children who received on-time vaccinations performed better on 2 of the tests than their delayed-vax counterparts.) A caveat: the study addresses children born between 1993-1997, and infants now receive 2 additional vaccines and one that has been reformulated. However, infants now receive fewer vaccine antigens than they did when the study was being conducted. Because these studies must by necessity be longitudinal, there is not yet any evidence regarding the current schedule.
The study: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/peds.2009-2489v1
Good luck with your decision! I know how difficult it is. It feels very wrong to expose your infant to so many shots to early, but in the end we decided that it felt more wrong not to.
[Edited to add links]
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Dr. Sears has a website and a book. I have heard that his is a middle way but the American Academy of Pediatrics is against even it:
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/123/1/e164
And let me say that my infant (who was too young to be vaccinated) caught a disease from a child whose parent's decided not to vaccinate and I was PISSED. I had to take care of my very sick, very unhappy child because of a decision someone else made. He didn't get something life-threatening but it still messed up our lives for a couple of weeks. I can't even imagine how angry I would have been had he been hospitalized or died.
I didn't like the idea of my little baby getting lots of shots at once (mostly because the first time he reacted poorly - fever, swelling) so I let the doctor give him a maximum of 2 at a time, but then the next week I went back for 2 more, and the next week for 2 more until he was up-to-date. It took more time and I had to pay a co-pay each additional time and he was low-grade sick for one day/week for 3 weeks instead of pretty sick for 2 days. But even with this slight change in schedule I felt bad about exposing other people's kids to the diseases he didn't get vaccinated against on time.
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What a great question. We were concerned about so many shots at once, and wondered about the likelihood of the various diseases in our area, now, etc. Like Lena, we do want our child to be vaccinated, and we do believe in herd immunity as the only way to protect infants and other susceptible children and adults, but we wondered if they could be spaced out a bit more. So, we talked to our pediatrician and asked her advice about which ones we might wait on. She told us helpful things, like pertussis was not one to skip this season, but that Hep A - for our household, kids not in daycare, etc - we could safely wait on. Hopefully you also have a pediatrician you can trust to take you seriously?
I did a quick internet search for alternative schedules on the internet - as no doubt you've already done - and was a bit disturbed by some of the sites. One site that shares quite a few alternative schedules is still claiming that MMR has been linked to autism, which has been disproven in every way that studies can disprove things (ie. multiple findings of no correlation). I was unable to find a schedule posted on what I consider an authoritative, regularly updated site, but - like Lena - have heard the Dr. Sears Vaccine Book mentioned as the go-to source.
As a somewhat related fyi, PBS Frontline recently released a good documentary on the topic that shows both sides of the "Vaccine War": http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/vaccines/view/; and our own Parents Guild Blog posted a related vaccination-choice pro / con type debate here: http://blog.parentsguild.com/?s=vaccine.
Good luck!
So happy to hear where you're at now! Seems like great progress on such an especially challenging topic... If you come up with a definitive answer, hope you'll share that too (if it's not too personal to ask)!
- andrea, Jun 30, 2010
Thanks Andrea & Lena! I watched that PBS documentary and I highly recommend it to anyone. It was very informative, and I really appreciated all the view points they presented! I really didn't know where to start researching the topic of vaccnations, the video was one of the first things I watched.
After deciding my view points on the topic, I did end up having a great discussion with our doctor about the schedule, the why's, and trying to understand the science behind it all. I do hope that more funding and time will go into researching not just MMR (I think we've beaten that one), but ALL of the vaccines combined. It's a lot to shoot up an arm all at once!
I'm going to review the Dr. Sears schedule to see if it fits with what I think would be right for us, but ultimately it's a choice I'm going to have to make on my own. One thing I know for sure is that I'm definitely willing to spend a bit more money and time for peace of mind.
- Erin, Jun 29, 2010