Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Please please please follow the vaccination schedule.
Pediatricians take a 6 figure pay cut because of how much they care about protecting kids, everything on there is for a reason - COVID nonsense aside.
If you have something specific other than COVID you have concerns about you should dig into that separately.
Keep in mind we've already started to have things like Measles outbreaks because of people become vaccine hesitant. Many of these disease are very deadly.
You also may introduce logistical problems down the line as your kid can't go to certain schools or get certain jobs (like healthcare) without jumping through extra hoops.
Also considering almost every kids gets this stuff we'd know about problems for the older stuff at this point.
Did you read my post? Of course I am giving my kids the MMR vaccine. They’ll get all the vaccines I got plus probably chicken pox as well. But why the US schedule and not the Danish one?
Yeah sorry lemme rephrase as "please please please follow the *U.S. vaccination schedule."
Not accusing you of not going for MMR but just using it as an example of downstream effects.
Something to keep in mind is that the U.S. schedule is optimized for "we are the wealthiest country in the in world" others may have more resource limitation focused choices.
COVID you can skip.
Using your other post as a reference point (and please forgive me Peds is not my area so I my professional level knowledge of this is distant).
Also several of these can impact getting jobs or housing at university (ex: the Heps, Meningitis), and skipping them will put you in the naughty bucket in your pediatrician's mind which isn't necessarily appropriate but is the reality.
Hep A - prob rare in Denmark? Hep B - prob rare in Denmark? Chicken Pox - no idea why they aren't doing this. Per PLOS Glob Public Health. 2023 Apr 5;3(4):e0001743. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0001743 eople are advocating it? Rotavirus - this one is super complex and can't really be summarized here. Covid - skip if you want. Flu - don't skip please. Tetanus (from age 12) again probably low yield. Meningitis (from age 12) - don't skip please, looks like they have it but don't give to kids? Maybe it's pre college matriculation? IDK seems strange.
Keep in mind that incidence of disease varies country to country and the sheer variety and amount of immigrants in the U.S. (as well as poor health) put people at higher risks of somethings. This impacts the schedule.
It's absolutely insane to inject a newborn with anything on the nonexistent risk of Hepatitis.
That's the very first one that you're begging me to trust, and I simply won't do it. It's existence on the schedule is a glaring red mark that serves to undermine trust in the rest. You cannot convince me that my children are at risk for hepatitis, and therefore trying to get me to positively intervene on the basis of what I consider to be a nonexistent risk is going to run into a brick wall.
The flu vaccine doesn't work. It doesn't reduce deaths. It doesn't even always target the dominant strain, because it's educated guesswork. The flu going around right now is doing so in spite of vaccinations.
Don't remind me, I won't reach the conclusion you want me to.
Flu: -PMID: 37247308 for a citation that disagrees with your conclucion. Outside those at high risk it does reduce symptomatic burden, as someone who has gotten real flu and vaccinated flu.....that's a big difference.
Hepatitis: Use Chesterton's fence. Why is it there? Is it because of risk of vertical transmission? Is it because it's safe to be given at that time and that's simply the best time to get it done because of logistics. Also, were you aware that the various hepatitis viruses are transmitted in different ways?
Understand why before getting made about it.
From other comments you made:
Safe Vaccines: -What's the rate of actual problems beyond mild stuff like headache? All medications have side effects. Nothing is truly safe. You can randomly die from anything. How many actual serious problems have happened. It looks like the rate of true allergy is somewhere around one in a million (1 in 900k per UK vaccine website I found which was the first google hit). The odds of getting any of these conditions are much much much higher than that.
General Dissatisfaction with Medicine Comments: -So like, are you just not going to seek medical care now because they bungled some parts of COVID? That's stupid. For anything related to COVID? Or politics? More reasonable. The "normal" vaccines are settled science. It's apples and oranges.
I don't think "I'm going to do my own research" is unreasonable but I don't think many people are actually doing that, they are just reading biased online commentary and throwing things into chat GPT.
People with a lot more knowledge than either of us very very carefully and very very publicly consider the risks and benefits of putting something on the vaccine schedule and have removed things before that were "worth it" because of disgruntled public optics.
General anti-vaxxer is a conspiracy theory level take and has been for a long time - see the whole vaccines and autism thing.
Plenty of citations available saying similar stuff about COVID vaccines -- and the motivation for that (encourage people who don't really need some vaccine to take them in protection of the elderly, opposite sex, etc) is just as present for the flu shot.
That's the thing about burning your credibility -- after you've done it on one thing, people are apt not to trust you anymore in areas where they previously did.
Do you have evidence for this?
What about alternative explanations like "this shit is complicated to study and testing was done on initial more virulent strains with more vulnerable populations?"
Evidence that the COVID vax recommendations were not primarily motivated by benefit to the individual recipients?
<gestures wildly at 'everything'>
Recommending them for children at all (or anyone under ~40 really) is a good starting point -- the age stratification of severity was never remotely uncertain.
Imagine for a second you belief the vaccines are safe.
Great, even if fatality rates for kids from COVID were super low....well what's the harm? Plus you get the added benefit of herd immunity!
This sounds like a wonderful idea.
Now we know now that the benefits don't seem to outweigh the risks in a few specific populations - but the problem was that the acute nature of the situation and the politics (as well as some considerable stress) broke a lot of people's brains. Lots of stuff does that - see both pro and anti Trump people.
None of that applies to the general issue of vaccines.
Lots of people had questions and concerns about COVID related decision making. They were forcibly muzzled.
The most right wing pediatrician I know who puts on a MAGA hat after work, his response to general vaccine hesitancy is to imagine the parents alone with him in a dark room.
Their isn't any credible debate for most of the vaccine schedule and what exists (ex: Rotavirus) is quite healthy.
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