For decades, parents and pediatricians have followed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Childhood Immunization Schedule. It’s a monthly schedule that lays out the age a child should be vaccinated for common infectious diseases. Its main goal is to protect one of our most vulnerable populations: children, especially those under the age of 1. And it’s been wildly successful at doing just that. Diseases like polio or measles that, at one time, left children paralyzed, brain damaged, or even dead were eliminated in the United States. Globally, vaccines are estimated to save up to 4 million lives every year. According to the World Health Organization, the measles vaccine alone prevented 25.5 million deaths since the year 2000. Despite this, a recent Gallup poll found that fewer and fewer people in the US consider childhood vaccines important. Attitudes around vaccines are shifting, and the consequences of that are playing out in real time.
Why children get so many vaccines
Children get a lot of shots in the first few years of life. Here’s why.
In recent years, more and more parents are choosing to delay or even outright omit parts of the vaccine schedule. To be fair, it is a very overwhelming thing. There are 16 different diseases listed, some of them requiring up to five doses before a child hits 15 months. During the first year of a child’s life, they likely get at least one shot every time they go to the doctor. This has many parents asking why young children need so many shots so quickly. I spoke to two vaccine experts, Dr. Paul Offit from the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Dr. Jim Campbell from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and American Academy of Pediatrics, to find out.
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