Vaccination Nation

“She looks great,” our doctor said a few months later, during my daughter’s 2-week-old wellness checkup. She was one of the most respected pediatricians in town, and I had practically agreed to donate a kidney just to get an appointment with her. “Now, today, she’s due for a few vaccinations and….”

“Actually, I’d like to stagger her shots,” I said. The pediatrician sighed. “Let me go and get something,” she said, as if she’d dealt with moms like me many, many times before. “I’ll be right back.” A few minutes later, she returned with photocopies in her hands. “I’d like you to read over this information,” she said, speaking slowly and loudly so that my feeble brain could process what she was saying. “I’ll wait. As you’ll see, the vaccinations are perfectly safe.”

I looked down at the sheets, written so that a fifth-grader could understand them and heavily illustrated with drawings of smiling mothers, fathers and babies.

“I’ve done the research,” I said hesitantly. “I’ve read a lot about the shots and I want to stagger them.”

She smiled thinly. “I follow the schedule set by the American Academy of Pediatrics,” she said. “And I hate to say, ‘It’s my way or the highway,’ but….” she shrugged. “If you don’t want to follow the AAP schedule, you’ll just have to find another doctor.”

Oh God. I clutched my infant to my chest, feeling like I was in the principal’s office, about to be expelled from school. “OK,” I squeaked, tears welling in my eyes. As my husband and I trudged out, I wondered forlornly how my baby would survive, pediatricianless, in this pertussis-ridden world.

Despite the melodrama, we managed to find a pediatrician who easily agreed to stagger my daughter’s shots, but that incident was my personal introduction to a subject that makes otherwise dignified parents and doctors foam at the mouth. Remember the Sharks and the Jets? Well, they’ve got nothing on the Vaccinators and the Staggerers. Just ask my Internet readers, who brandished their opinions like nunchucks when I broached the subject on my Suburban Turmoil blog.

“You better believe my son gets his shots on schedule,” wrote Liz. “I had whooping cough as a child, and I will never ever forget how horrible it was. Not to mention chicken pox. Not to mention reading about the polio epidemic of 1912, the influenza epidemic of 1918, etc.”

“I have a 6-year-old with autism,” countered Misty. “He had the MMR [vaccination] at 18 months, had a seizure that night from a high fever, within three weeks he lost all speech, all fine motor skills and some gross motor skills. I believe whole heartedly that the vaccine caused it. I have two other children who I will not vaccinate.”

“I know some of the world’s leading vaccine authorities,” wrote a Vanderbilt doctor, “and can tell you that if they believed a vaccine was harmful they would...champion it not being given. They are parents too.”

“I believe in the good that vaccines have done, but I don’t believe that it’s necessary to pump small children full of numerous vaccines at once,” asserted Kat. “They CAN be safely staggered, we’ve done it with our 3-year-old and he’s as healthy as can be.”

I took an informal poll and, of 300 parents who responded, more than one in four reported either staggering their children’s vaccinations or not vaccinating at all. And that’s not good. I mean, I may stagger my kids’ shots, but I sure as hell don’t want to think that a fourth of the children my precious darlings play with in the YMCA nursery haven’t had all of theirs. For all I know, their scabs and runny noses are the end result of an extended vacation to Timbuktu and a rare strain of tsetse-itis.

The whole thing just gives me one more reason to lie awake at night, obsessing over lead paint on toys and dangerous chemicals in cans of formula and whether microwaved baby bottles contain carcinogens and, now, vaccinations. Parenting is the new Russian roulette, and we spin that chamber of choices wondering if this time, we’ll land on diphtheria. Or autism. Or cancer. Or E. coli.

Really, it’s a wonder my kids have survived at all.