Vaccine Mythbusters: Understanding and Countering Vaccine Resistance

Published Online: Monday, November 11, 2011

To download a pdf of this article as it appeared in MD Magazine: Peers & Perspectives, click here.

The modern anti-vaccine movement in the United States was born in 1982, with the unfounded claim that the pertussis vaccine caused brain damage, but it really took off in 1998 with the publication of a paper in The Lancet claiming that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism. Along the way, vaccine additives such as thimerosal and aluminum have been fingered as harmful and, as memories of the ravages of vaccine-preventable disease have faded, many have argued that vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent. Celebrity vaccine opponents such as Jenny McCarthy have drawn a great deal of media attention.
 
Vaccination rates in the US remain high overall, but pockets of resistance have developed, leaving some communities vulnerable to disease outbreaks. In recent years, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) has broken out in at least five states, pertussis in at least seven, and measles in at least 14. In 2006, mumps swept across the Midwest, infecting more than 6,500 people. If public confidence in vaccination erodes further, much larger outbreaks could be on the way.
 
To discuss the problem of vaccine resistance and how it can be countered, MD Magazine: Peers & Perspectives recently convened a panel of four of the nation’s leading vaccine experts: Henry (Hank) Bernstein, DO, vice chairman of the department of pediatrics and chief of general pediatrics at Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York and professor of pediatrics at Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine; Arthur L. Caplan, PhD, Emanuel and Robert Hart professor of bioethics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania; Douglas S. Diekema, MD, director of education at the Treuman Katz Center for Pediatric Bioethics and professor in the division of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine; and Margaret C. Fisher, MD, chair of the department of pediatrics and medical director at the Children’s Hospital at Monmouth Medical Center. The panel was moderated by Peter Salgo, MD, professor of anesthesiology and internal medicine at Columbia University and associate surgical director of the ICU at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. (Editor’s Note: The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.)

An Epidemic of Vaccine Misinformation and Resistance?

Salgo: To start off, can someone briefly explain the arguments that may make parents resist vaccinating their children? What are parents hearing?
 
Caplan: Parents hear a great deal from a lot of sources. If you go on the Internet, for example, and search for vaccine safety, you quickly get to sites claiming that vaccines are pretty dangerous, that they can not only cause autism, they can cause death. There are all kinds of unfounded allegations flying around.
 
Salgo: This got to the point where just a year ago when the H1N1 crisis came on, people were simply not vaccinating even though the reports on H1N1 were that it was a horrific disease both for adults and for children. What are the scientific arguments against these fears about vaccines?
 
Diekema: There is abundant data to support the fact that vaccines are in general very safe, and the majority of side effects that we do see are transient and minor. The kinds of side effects that a parent would really be concerned about are extraordinarily rare and are more than balanced by the risks of vaccine-preventable diseases.
 
That’s the other argument that you hear frequently, that these diseases are so rare that they don’t pose a risk. But recent events have proved otherwise. We had at least 10 deaths in California last year and we had a baby die in Washington this year, all from pertussis, or whooping cough. I’m not aware of a single death in the United States in the last several years from a vaccine, and yet we’ve lost at least a dozen children to vaccine-preventable diseases in the past year.
 
Salgo: All right, say I’m a parent and I come to you and you’ve got the syringe in your hand loaded up and I say, “Wait a minute, I’m the parent here. Can you guarantee me 100% that my kid is going to be okay with this vaccine? It won’t make my kid sick, it won’t kill my kid?”
 
Diekema: No, I can’t do that.
 
Salgo: I can hear the parents now, they’re shrieking out the door, saying, “I don’t want it!”
 
Fisher: What I would tell the parent in that scenario is, as they well know, there are no true, 100% guarantees in life. But vaccine safety is about as close to a guarantee as you’re ever going to get. Vaccines are not only tested before they’re licensed for use, they are tested in an ongoing way every day of the year to ensure that no new safety issues come up, or no new possible adverse events come up.
 
Caplan: One point about that parent who is headed to the door. As they run out the door saying, “I don’t want it! I don’t want it if you can’t guarantee,” you have to say to them, “If you’re taking your kid home in an automobile, that’s a lot more risky than the vaccine.” Give them examples of relative risk. If they let the kid have a dog, if they let the kid have a swimming pool, if they let the kid ride a horse, they’re way out of risk relative to what a vaccine poses. The benefit of vaccines is pretty strong, and the relative risk is tiny.
 
A Success Story Under Threat

Salgo: Let’s dig into the details a bit. The National Immunization Survey, which measures vaccination coverage of children 19 to 35 months old, found that vaccine coverage generally held steady or increased from 2009 to 2010. MMR coverage went up from 90% to 91.5%. The rotavirus vaccine shot up from 43.9% to 59.2%. As a side note, you don’t want to catch rotavirus, take it from me. No more details necessary.
 
Coverage with vaccines for polio, at least three doses of hep B, and varicella were all above the target of 90%, and just 0.7% of children had received no vaccines.¹ Well, you’ll forgive me, if you look at these numbers, I don’t see a crisis here. This sounds like a huge success story. Why are we having this discussion?
 
Fisher: It is a success story, and I think if you look at the levels of illness in this country, this is a fabulous success. This is the public health success of the last century and can continue to be so in this century. But with the media epidemic, with the ability to tweet and Facebook and blog and get information coming at you every five seconds, there is an abundance of misinformation out there that makes people a little bit crazy sometimes. I personally don’t give the vaccines, but I know from talking to people who do give them that they are spending much more time trying to convince people that this is the right way to go.
 
Caplan: We do pretty well in the United States in terms of getting vaccinated. But there are pockets in the community where those numbers aren’t true, where in a small town you could have only 20% of the people vaccinated, or in some communities nobody is getting vaccinated. So, that gives us a reservoir where disease can bubble out.
 
Salgo: I was reading that in some states and in some communities, parents are actually doing what I recall from my childhood— they are having measles parties and chicken pox parties, avoiding vaccines and instead choosing to give their kids wild-type disease. Am I nuts or are they nuts?
 
Diekema: I’d hesitate to call them nuts, but it’s probably not the best idea in the world. Many people consider chicken pox and measles to be mild diseases, but your child is much more likely to contract a problem by getting the wild disease than getting the vaccine. I can kind of understand why they’re doing this, but I think behind it is a failure to understand how potentially risky these diseases are.
 
Fisher: The measles parties to me are simply really horrifically bad judgment, because measles is a potentially fatal disease, and there is no way you would want your child to suffer that illness. Chicken pox has much less in the way of fatality, but it’s still not a pleasant disease. And if you get wild chicken pox, you will have that virus living within your body, in your nerves, for the rest of your life, and therefore have the potential to get shingles or zoster as you get older.
 
Salgo: Arthur, I’ll go further and ask you, as the ethicist, is it ethical to take your kid to a chicken pox party or a measles party and infect your kid that way rather than give the vaccines?
 
Caplan: Absolutely unethical. It’s poor judgment. It’s exposing them to the threat of a much nastier set of consequences. The vaccines that you could be using to get that protection are infinitely safer, so it’s really bad parenting. It’s really bad judgment.
 
Salgo: Don’t hold back, Arthur. Just tell us what you really think. I’ve got to tell you, there was a study in Pediatrics on parents’ attitudes toward vaccines. It was done at the University of Michigan based on a survey from early 2009 and it found that 25% of parents thought that vaccines cause autism—25%! 11% said children don’t need vaccines for diseases that are no longer common. 11.5% had refused at least one vaccine for their child, and 30% thought parents should have the right to refuse vaccines for their children for any reason at all.²
 
Does this indicate that we may have a bigger problem on our hands than we think? Are there a lot of parents out there following the vaccine schedule for now, but just on the cusp of becoming vaccine resisters?
 
Caplan: I think so. I think there is danger that we’re kind of hanging by our fingernails here. Those attitudes and those worries have remained steady, which is incredible given what we’re starting to learn about autism. I’ll summarize it by saying it’s pretty clear that autism has some genetic components and some factors that are identifiable before children get vaccinated.
 
Who Is to Blame?

Salgo: But whose fault is this? It’s really easy to say, “Oh, it’s that bad Internet and all those bad celebrities and those bad TV talk shows.” What are we as MDs doing on the other side? Shouldn’t we be more vocal? We’re letting these assumptions go unchallenged, no?
 
Caplan: You have to challenge more. There has been a one-sided conversation on too many TV shows. There is some reluctance from good docs and good scientists who don’t want to get in there and actually have to duke it out with Jenny McCarthy.
 
Salgo: They don’t want to mix it up, but maybe they have to.
 
Caplan: You just do. This is a public health problem, it’s a public education problem. You have to speak up at your high school, at your church, at your civic organization. People need to hear the vaccine story, what it’s achieved, why they’re safe, why herd immunity is important, and basically why there is a moral duty to help the weak and the vulnerable. Remember, babies can’t get vaccinated; people with immune diseases are compromised. If you have a transplant you are compromised. There’s all kinds of folks out there who rely on us to protect them, and that’s part of the story, too.
 
Salgo: Well, let me make this even worse. There is another recent Pediatrics study, also by University of Michigan researchers. They found that 13% of parents of young children were following an alternative vaccination schedule to the one recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics, and here’s the real hook: Of the parents on the alternative schedule, 40% said their child’s physician “seemed supportive” of their choice, and another 22% said the physician was the one who suggested the alternative schedule.³
 
So, first, what’s the problem with spacing out the vaccinations a bit so your kid doesn’t get jabbed with a bunch of needles in a single doctor’s visit? And, do we have a problem when so many docs are going along with alternative schedules?
 
Fisher: This is one where you’re kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The American Academy of Pediatrics has been very supportive of physicians trying to partner with parents and ensure that the parents stay within the practice and that they use every opportunity to try to get those children immunized. So, if that’s being supportive, yeah, but it doesn’t mean the doctor really wants them to do it on an alternative schedule.
 
But what we’re starting to see now is that there are plenty of pediatricians who will not go along with the altered schedule and who feel very strongly that if a parent is questioning them about the basic protective things for their child, such as immunizations, then they don’t want those people in their practice.
 
Salgo: So they kick them out?
 
Fisher: They in fact dismiss them from their practice.
 
Bernstein: When I was in private practice, that’s exactly what we would do. We would help the family find another health care provider that could better meet what they felt were the appropriate medical needs.
 
Should Pediatricians “Fire” Vaccine Resisters?

Salgo: Let me be a devil’s advocate here for a minute. The parent comes in concerned and says, “I’m worried. I don’t want to do it quite this way.” And the way this sounds, at least, is the doc says, “You’re going to do it my way or the highway— get out of here!” And so the parent is left in limbo, and the kid doesn’t get vaccinated. Is that reasonable?
 
Caplan: It seems to me there is one important language thing that doctors can do. There isn’t an “alternative schedule,” there are dangerous alternatives. The schedule is proven, so we have to be careful how we use those terms around parents. You don’t want to give them the idea that, yeah, you can leave at 10:00 or you can leave at 10:30, it’s up to you, you can decide. We box ourselves in if we’re not careful in our terms.
 
How you negotiate with parents, I think, is a very difficult issue. I’m not sure we know whether it’s better to turn them aside after trying hard or to stick with it and see if you can convert them. I lean toward sticking with it and seeing if you can convert them because I think the kids are not going to get the best care if we don’t keep banging on the heads of the parents. We could actually use some study to see whether you get better compliance in the long run by saying, “My way or the highway,” or by saying, “We’ll keep at it, and I’m going to try to change your mind on this.”
 
Fisher: We’re also seeing parents who are getting excited about other people who don’t immunize their children. They are beginning to ask, “Why is that child in my child’s classroom if they’re not protected? They’re a risk to my child.”
 
And there are many pediatricians who will say, “If you don’t want to immunize your child, I don’t feel it’s safe for you to bring your child to my waiting room and potentially expose my other patients who either can’t be immunized because they’re too young or because they’re sick or because the vaccine won’t work in that patient. And that’s why I can’t have you doing an alternate schedule or not vaccinating your child and staying in my practice.”
 
Diekema: But I would point out that that strategy is really a form of not in my backyard, because those kids are going to end up in somebody’s waiting room or they’re going to end up in an ER waiting room, and so you don’t—
 
Fisher: Or they get a concierge doctor who comes to their house.
 
Diekema: That’s not likely to happen with most of these kids. The reality is they’re going to go somewhere where they’re sitting in a waiting room with somebody else.
 
Fisher: That’s why we want them to be immunized.
 
Diekema: Exactly. But the point is that in firing them from your practice, you can make the claim that you are protecting your other patients, but from a public health perspective, you’re really not protecting the public; you’re just sending them to a different practice.
 
Bernstein: There are a couple of phrases that have been used here: “My way or the highway,” and “Firing them from the practice.” To me, that’s not how most pediatricians are handling things. Even when we were in practice, we made every effort to explain to families and parents why their children needed to be up-to-date, the amount of disease that could be prevented. We talked about alternative schedules causing their children to be less protected and increasing their risk of catching diseases. And we have actually been able to turn some families by giving them additional resources.
 
Health Care Providers and Adolescents Lag

Salgo: Why don’t we take a look at another statistic which is disturbing to me. Last flu season, 63.5% of health care professionals got the flu vaccine—only 63.5%!⁴ Do we have any hope of convincing parents of the importance of vaccination when a third of health care professionals can’t be bothered to get a flu shot?
 
Fisher: I think it’s a disgrace. How can we look ourselves in the eye when we are the ones not getting the vaccines? And when you ask people why they don’t get flu shots, for some reason there is even more misperception and misinformation about influenza than all the other vaccines.
 
Salgo: I cannot go further here without coming to a point that was recently in the news. [Republican presidential candidate and US Representative] Michele Bachmann said that she was told by a woman that her daughter had the HPV vaccine and then became mentally retarded. And then, Arthur, you went on the media and said you would give a $10,000 reward for the name and the medical records of the person Bachmann was referring to. Did you get any takers? Are you $10,000 poorer, and what were you hoping to achieve by making the offer in the first place?
 
Caplan: My wife wondered that, too. But the fact was that there is no evidence, never has been, that the HPV vaccine causes any type of retardation. In all the data that’s ever come out on the vaccine, that has not been a side effect. So, I was certain that the congresswoman didn’t know what she was talking about. What I wanted to do was make a point and nip in the bud the possibility that more false information about vaccines was going to get out there. I thought it was really irresponsible, and it bothered me a lot that she was just reporting a story or an anecdote and not relying on any kind of proof or evidence.
 
Salgo: You may be aware, a CDC advisory panel recently recommended that 11- and 12-year-old boys get the HPV vaccine in addition to girls. Is this going to stir up more controversy or is this exactly the sort of thing the health care community should be doing: proposing vaccination for diseases?
 
Fisher: It’s exactly what the health care community should be doing.
 
Salgo: And it’s going to make people crazy, isn’t it?
 
Fisher: You know, I think it will make a few people crazy who were going to be crazy anyway. For whatever reason, people have decided to talk about the human papilloma virus vaccine as if it is something that is going to awaken sexual desire in a child who is immunized. It’s kind of absurd, and if you instead forget about the fact that HPV is sexually transmitted and talk about the fact that this is meant to prevent cancers, I think that intelligent people are happy to have the equipment to prevent cancer.
 
Salgo: On the topic of adolescent vaccines, the NIS-Teen Survey of vaccine coverage for 13- to 17-year-olds found that between 2009 and 2010, coverage of Tdap increased from 55.6% to 68.7%. Meningococcal conjugate went up from 53.6% to 62.7%, going in the right direction.⁵ But those numbers seem, again, low. They’re down there in the weeds along with physician vaccination against the flu. Is adolescent vaccination slipping under the radar here with all the sturm und drang going on over childhood vaccination?
 
Diekema: I don’t think that it’s slipping under the radar; I think adolescents just pose a much bigger challenge to get vaccinated than children do.
 
A Rogue’s Gallery

Salgo: Let’s sort of rank the culprits behind vaccine resistance. We’ve got the docs and the other health care providers who aren’t getting vaccinated; we’ve got a medical community that doesn’t seem to be out there as much as the celebrities are on the Web and elsewhere. We’ve got the media, the Internet, we’ve got Jenny McCarthy, we’ve got a presidential candidate, Michele Bachmann. This is a rogue’s gallery, isn’t it? Who is really to blame out here?
 
Diekema: I don’t know that the important question is who is to blame. I think there are plenty of physicians who would be more than happy to appear next to Jenny McCarthy. The problem is getting the invitation. And I think the bigger problem that we have from physicians in the medical profession is that we need to learn how to talk to the public in a way that is as effective as the Jenny McCarthys and the Bob Sears and the others who advocate no immunizations or alternative schedules.
 
The reality is that it’s not effective to spout statistics and talk facts. When you’re dealing with the public, you need to engage with some degree of emotion. You need to tell stories, you need to be as effective as Jenny McCarthy at being sympathetic and provoking some kind of an emotional response. And so we do need to tell stories about kids who have been harmed by not being vaccinated rather than talking about statistics, because we know statistics just don’t alter behavior in the way that telling stories does.
 
Stories, Not Statistics

Salgo: Let’s change gears just a little bit. Where do we go from here? Suppose you’re a pediatrician, and a parent shows up in your office and tells you, “I’ve done some online research. I’ve spoken to a friend opposed to vaccination. I’m now convinced that vaccines are (a) dangerous and (b) unnecessary, because everybody else is getting the vaccine, so my kid is not going to get the disease. And the risk of the vaccine right now is greater than the risk from the disease it protects against.” Where do you even start? How do you change their mind?
 
Bernstein: We need to make sure that all parents and their patients are informed of the risks and benefits and have the opportunity to have their questions or concerns, their issues, their wonderments answered. So, it takes time. And there is no question that office visits where we’re explaining all about the value of vaccines has lengthened visits considerably. But we really do need to make sure that parents have an opportunity to ask their questions.
 
Salgo: So, you start by answering the questions and you say something like, “Look, here are the numbers, here’s the risk, blah, blah, blah,” and the parent says, “Those are numbers; my kid is my kid, I don’t want to take any risk for my kid, and this vaccine is a risk.”
 
Diekema: The place you always start with parents, in my mind, is you are sympathetic to their concerns and you validate those. You basically say, “I understand why you’re concerned, I understand you’ve heard this. Let’s talk about that.” Because if you don’t display a willingness to listen to their concerns right up front, they’re not going to be interested in listening to what you have to say.
 
Then the next step is to try to understand what their specific concern is, because the concerns are different for different people. For some people, it’s all the shots; for some people, it’s that they’ve heard that this or that or all vaccines are risky; for others, it’s that they don’t see the point because they’ve never known a kid who has had measles or chicken pox. And understanding their specific concern allows you to address it.
 
As I mentioned earlier, giving parents a set of facts is less effective than talking to them like a real person. Talk to them about the kids you’ve seen with pertussis or whatever the disease is you’re immunizing against. These are horrific diseases, and I can describe them to parents and talk to them about how they really don’t want to see their child go through this.
 
Salgo: One of the successes of the anti-vaccine folks is that they are not appealing to numbers, they are not appealing to statistics; they’re talking about emotions. They are very good at saying, “Look at the tragedy of this family. Look at the heartbreak of these parents.” And the health care community comes back with a statement such as, “It’s more risky not to have this vaccine than to have this vaccine,” which doesn’t have the same punch. I think that that’s what you’re saying, Douglas.
 
Diekema: That is what I’m saying. I’ve watched Jenny McCarthy sitting on the couch next to a talking head, and there is no question who is going to lose that battle when the talking head starts talking statistics, because they just don’t resonate with people the same way her stories do. That’s what I meant when I said I think in some ways we need to learn to speak a little differently to our patients about these issues.
 
Salgo: Should parents ever be allowed to opt out of vaccination based on personal or religious objections?
 
Fisher: The problem is that they’re making a decision for their child that is putting their child at significant risk. There are many things that you don’t let parents opt out of; for example, you cannot get out of my hospital unless you have a car seat to take your baby home. So, I think that parents should not be able to opt out based on personal belief.
 
Having said that, the exception proves the rule. There is a religion, Christian Science, where children receive no medical care, period. Should those people be allowed to have children? This is a free country, and we support religious freedom. So, that would be the only exception to my rule.
 
Spreading the Pro-vaccine Message

Salgo: Are there any particular arguments that resonate with parents, that bring people who are anti-vaccine back into the pro-vaccine fold?
 
Bernstein: We have had many anti-vaccine people change their mind when someone in their church or in their community suddenly gets a vaccine-preventable disease and is admitted to the hospital, the intensive care unit or, God forbid, even dies: a college student with meningococcal disease; influenza in a perfectly healthy child who was at day care last week. When it really hits home and it’s a direct experience, it changes their perspective dramatically.
 
Salgo: What about a public health campaign? What about we get a couple of high-profile Hollywood folks who think vaccines are a good idea. Why couldn’t the pro-vaccine community do that?
 
Diekema: There is no reason we couldn’t do that. In some ways, the most effective spokespersons would be parents of children who have contracted vaccine-preventable diseases in part because others have not gotten vaccinated.
 
Salgo: Let me ask a provocative question: Is it ethical to put Jenny McCarthy on television? Is it ethical to put an anti-vaccine person on a network television show to promote an idea which is intellectually bankrupt and that endangers children? And would you say that when this person appears, the program that did it needs to be called out?
 
Diekema: One of the problems I think we have with the media today is that they are more interested in finding extremists on issues, whether the extremist views have any grounding in fact or not, as opposed to seeking the truth. And that is particularly true when you look at some of the TV and radio talk shows. And that’s unethical. The media should be looking for the truth and, at a minimum, somebody like Jenny McCarthy needs to be balanced by somebody who has a reasonable view. But if there is evidence that her view has no grounding, it’s not clear to me that she should be on those shows.
 
Fisher: Right, you wouldn’t allow a person who thinks you should bomb a post office to go on the air just because there is someone else who thinks you shouldn’t. If you have an outrageous idea, that doesn’t mean, whether you’re a celebrity or not, that you should get to tell the whole world your idea. That doesn’t mean we’re blocking free speech, but because of their notoriety and because of their celebrity, these people do have access to media that other people don’t have.
 
Salgo: I’m going to mention a name, and you can stay in your seats for just a moment, but that name is Andrew Wakefield. He wrote an article in 1998 in The Lancet connecting the MMR vaccine to autism. That fueled a lot of fears about vaccines generally. Now the article has been formally retracted, and Wakefield has been stripped of his UK medical license. Is this going to decrease vaccine resistance or does it have a life of its own now?
 
Diekema: Even more important than the things you mentioned is the fact that the data that Wakefield published has been proved to be false. He actually falsified the data he published. The bottom line is that it never should have been published in the first place. Despite that, he has not gone away. He continues to say what he wants to say about vaccines, and some people still believe him. I think in the long run, the fact that his studies have been discredited is a benefit to the vaccination movement and to getting children vaccinated, because there were many people who were relying on his study to at least appear to provide a scientific basis for this link between autism and the measles vaccine.
 
Salgo: Before we leave, one last question: On balance, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the state of vaccination in the United States?
 
Bernstein: I am very optimistic.
 
Diekema: I am as well. We have very safe vaccines. I think most people in this country are very reasonable and want to protect their kids and realize that the best thing for their children is to get vaccinated.
 
Fisher: I am an optimist about most everything in life, but about vaccines I am exceedingly optimistic. Not only do we have great vaccines now, but we are going to get even more and better vaccines going forward.
 
References
1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National and state vaccination coverage among children aged 19–35 months — United States, 2010. MMWR. 2011;60:1157-1163.
2. Freed GL, Clark SJ, Butchart AT, et al. Parental vaccine safety concerns in 2009. Pediatrics. 2010;125:654-659.
3. Dempsey AF, Schaffer S, Singer D, et al. Alternative vaccination schedule preferences among parents of young children [published online ahead of print October 3, 2011]. Pediatrics. Accessed October 31, 2011.
4. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Influenza vaccination coverage among health-care personnel — United States, 2010-11 influenza season. MMWR 2011;60:1073-1077.
5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National and state vaccination coverage among adolescents aged 13 through 17 years — United States, 2010. MMWR. 2011;60:1117-1123.
 
Resources
Sounds of Pertussis
Enlists celebrity spokespeople, including NASCAR champion Jeff Gordon and singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, to raise awareness of pertussis vaccination.
 
Every Child by Two
Founded in 1991 after a measles epidemic that killed almost 150 people, ECBT promotes completing the childhood sequence of immunizations by age two. Launched the Vaccinate Your Baby awareness campaign (www.vaccinateyourbaby.org), featuring actress Amanda Peet as a spokesperson.
 
Parents of Kids with Infectious Diseases (PKIDs)
Started by parents of kids with infectious diseases, including those preventable by vaccines, PKIDs promotes immunization as well as the search for infectious disease cures and other measures to prevent their spread.
 
Childhood Influenza Immunization Coalition
Organization whose goal is to protect infants, children, and adolescents from influenza by making immunization a national health priority.
 
Families Fighting Flu
Dedicated to increasing influenza vaccination rates to protect the lives of children, the organization’s members include families whose children have suffered serious medical complications or even died from influenza.
 
Instant Childhood Immunization Schedule
Adolescent Immunization Scheduler
Interactive tools from the CDC to keep track of necessary vaccines.
 
American Academy of Pediatrics
Information from the AAP on the importance of immunization.
 
Sneeze Video
A video from the government of South Australia that promotes influenza vaccination by showing sneezes in slow motion.