A note from a pediatrician who supports the US vaccination schedule
I'll let him make the case. Very interested to hear your comments.
NOTE TO READERS: This email defending the American vaccine schedule came in the wake of the piece about the Danish vaccine schedule. I have cut it for length but am otherwise running it unedited — the writer is capable of speaking for himself.
His point of view is worth a listen. He’s a straight shooter. There’s no fake moral chest-beating or insistence on protecting grandma here, just an argument that these diseases can be nasty even if they aren’t fatal. Judge - and comment - for yourself!
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(And subscribe for yourself! Founding Members get a free T-shirt, and the respect of millions.*
*Respect not guaranteed. T-shirt is.)
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Hi Alex
After following your Substack since 2021 as a free subscriber I just purchased an annual membership. What triggered it was the recent discussion about the Denmark immunization schedule.
Frankly, I don’t see a huge difference between the Danish and US vaccination schedule [the writer then posted chart noting that the biggest differences are the lack of rotavirus and hepatitis A and B vaccines]…
According to: https://www.cdc.gov/pinkbook/hcp/table-of-contents/chapter-19-rotavirus.html
Rotavirus was discovered as a cause of gastroenteritis in 1973. It caused 2.7 million infections per year and affected 95% of children by age 5. “Rotavirus infection was responsible for 410,000 physician visits, more than 200,000 emergency department visits, 55,000 to 70,000 hospitalizations, and 20 to 60 deaths annually in children younger than age 5 years. Rotavirus accounted for 30% to 50% of all hospitalizations for gastroenteritis among children younger than age 5 years; the incidence of clinical illness was highest among children age 3 to 35 months…
In my own pediatric practice the worst case I had of rotavirus infection was a child who was hospitalized for a week with diarrhea and dehydration. I have not seen a child hospitalized with rotavirus since the vaccine was introduced.
Based on the reduced morbidity alone I would support the use of the Rotavirus vaccine. Denmark appears to have applied a “severe complication” standard and have decided not to approve its addition to the routine vaccine schedule.
Interestingly nearby neighbors, Finland, Norway and parts of Sweden do recommend the rotavirus vaccine.
With the introduction of the varicella vaccine in the US in 1995 and a 2nd dose in 2007 the incidence of chickenpox has plummeted. As a secondary benefit to vaccine recipients so has the incidence of Shingles, a reactivation of a latent VZV infection…
Varicella vaccination can reduce the incidence of the rare, but often fatal Group A streptococcal infectious complication of Necrotizing Fascitis: Varicella vaccination needed to avoid severe complications…
Hepatitis A infections prior to the introduction of the HAV vaccine were estimated to be about 270,000 annually (including anicteric and asymptomatic cases). Many of these cases were in children. With the introduction of the vaccine there has been a 95% reduction in cases in the US…
Hepatitis B – I suspect that the US universal neonatal/infant recommendation is based on the previous difficulties in adequately vaccinating only reportedly “high risk” individuals….
The rest are nearly the same schedule except for one less infant dose of DTaP, IPV, Hib and PCV. Denmark also recommends the HPV vaccine at age 12, although I have been administering it at age 9. I find parents are less "squeamish" about the sexual transmission aspect at that age. Remember, it not only prevents HPV triggered cervical cancer, but HPV associated throat and anal cancers as well, which is why I administered it to males and females equally.
Lastly, after nearly a 50-year career in pediatrics I have had the opportunity to see up close many of the infectious diseases we now have effective vaccines to prevent.
This was often not a pretty sight especially for the patients. Some of those infections had a high mortality and others a high morbidity.
But, in a way vaccines have become a victim of their own success. When you don’t see infectious diseases on a regular basis it is easy to become complacent about them. Out of sight. Out of mind. Or as the flipped quip goes, “Forgotten, but not gone”.
Keep up your great work.
XXXX MD
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In turn, I asked him for his “take on RSV, Covid and flu shots for kids.”
Here was his answer.
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(But first, another subscribe button.)
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Sure. Covid - I told parents we have the vaccine if they desire it. If not, no big deal. If they wanted more information I would discuss it, but no pressure for or against it.
The strident talk from the Biden Administration and the CDC on overhyping the COVID vaccine has done more to reduce trust in vaccinations than anything or anyone. The only COVID admissions I had were kids under 2 months of age with COVID croup.
Zero cases of MIS-C and zero cases of "Long COVID" whatever that is.
As for flu, no question in my experience it was a much more severe infection for kids than COVID. I've been waiting my whole career for someone to discover a way to make a flu vaccine that would actually work well, not be dependent on antibodies to surface proteins subject to rapid mutations, and immunity would last a lifetime…
RSV - Definitely on par with flu when it comes to severity particularly in infants under 6 months of age or premature infants. I thought Nirsevimab [passive immunization through RSV antibodies] was great and recommended it for my eligible patients. Unfortunately, Sanofi royally screwed up their initial estimate of patient demand for it and we ran out of product in 3 weeks.
N=1, I had a 6 year old patient with a genetic disorder causing severe failure to thrive and muscle weakness. The patient would have been a candidate for it, based on risk factors for pulmonary disease, but was disqualified based on the age criteria.
I wasn't about to give a brand new drug (technically it's not a vaccine) off label. The patient got RSV and ended up almost having a respiratory arrest in our office and ended up in the PICU [pediatric intensive care unit] for nearly a year! Imagine the benefit to the patient and family not to mention the cost savings if I were able to administer it and it actually worked…
As a 3rd year pediatric resident in 1978 I took care of a 4 week old with neonatal pertussis who was intubated for a month and survived despite his complication of fungal septicemia. Anytime you can prevent that complication I'm all for it. You remember cases like that for your entire career...
I'm an Evidence Based Medicine hardliner. If someone disagrees with me, fine. Just show me the data that proves your position or just admit you're responding emotionally, not scientifically. Please don't use my real name… I don't need my wife getting any agita over it.
Kudos to the establishment pediatrician who has read your stack for the last few years. I am sure he knew that throwing in his two cents would be met with some criticism.
I am an anesthesiologist, so I do not have the experience of seeing tons of kids in an outpatient setting. But I am an evidence driven person too.
This doctor is using the same argument you hear from all the talking heads: Vaccines have saved millions of lives! How can anyone who is sane argue with that? If you have any kind of hesitancy, you must be insane. Nobody so deranged should ever be given a platform, etc. etc.
Without going to the effectiveness of "the vaccines", no where does the doctor mention risk. All of it is a benefit argument. That is not what is driving the so-called "antivax" movement. It is about safety. That is where the orthodoxy has very little to support it. Without understanding the safety profile, how can one know whether a certain vaccine is not causing more harm than benefit?
The doctor draws from his own experience. It's worthy to consider and appreciate that he shares it with us. Let's look at his own anecdotal experience. He mentions one case of rotavirus that put a child into the hospital for a week. No more since he started giving a rotavirus vaccine to his patients.
Wonderful!
How many children has he given the vaccine to? In other words, based on his own experience, how many children would he have to expose to vaccine risks in order to prevent a single hospitalization?
It is fascinating that as a self-proclaimed evidence driven doctor he fails to mention this key parameter in his calculus. I find that this is very common among my own physician colleagues who are pediatricians and family medicine doctors. It doesn't even cross their mind. Why?
BECAUSE WE KNOW THEY ARE SAFE!!
That's the problem. Safe is something very abstract, but it is used as an absolute. It's safe so give it! Give it to everybody!
The reality is that we have no idea how safe they are if they haven't been tested against saline placebos in a prelicensing double blind trial.
Dear Doctor, if you are reading this, please spare us the "it wouldn't be ethical to not give a vaccine to the control group" argument. Even if you subscribe to the logic behind it (which is immediately specious--there are many, more children who have not volunteered to participate who also are "unprotected"), one must still avail yourself of the fact that if this is the way this has been done since the beginning, you would have to concede that you don't know what the safety profile is. Even the Salk Poliomyelitis trial of 1954 did not use a saline placebo (they used an unidentified solution + formaldehyde + antibiotics + dye).
This begs an obvious question: why didn't they use saline? People who eschewed the original polio formulation didn't go to the clinic and get a formaldehyde/antibiotic/dye injection. They stayed away and took their chances. There would be no reason to use this kind of "placebo" other than to hide some of the adverse reactions from the vaccine.
For some reason this veteran pediatrician did not mention anything about chronic diseases since the number of vaccines on the immunization schedule has increased six fold. Are we to assume that unlike the rest of the country he is not seeing anymore asthma, reactive airways disease, allergic rhinitis, otitis media, seizure disorders, diabetes, eczema, ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, etc. in his practice?
My point being that for someone who has followed your work since 2021, why didn't he even mention that? That is what is behind Secretary Kennedy's appointment. It speaks to the fact that the establishment still hasn't grasped what all the blowback is from.
He quotes:
"Rotavirus infection was responsible for 410,000 physician visits, more than 200,000 emergency department visits, 55,000 to 70,000 hospitalizations, and 20 to 60 deaths annually in children younger than age 5 years"
Okay, so how many kids under five die from Rotavirus now? How many of them are vaccinated and how many haven't? You need to know the difference to come up with the number of lives saved. Why did he stop there?
You cannot stop there, otherwise you just sound like a PSA from the CDC. Now you have to figure out how many kids you have to vaccinate in order to save those extra kids. Even if the vaccine was 100% effective you would have to vaccinate several million children to save 60 max.
What kind of uncaring person would even suggest not doing everything to prevent 60 pediatric deaths??
But you don't know if you are causing more deaths by doing so from other causes. You need to know what is the all cause mortality rate in the unvaccinated population compared to the vaccinated in order to prove that the benefit is greater than harm.
This is the foundation of the vaccine hesitancy in this country. One does not have to assume a depopulation agenda to understand that we have no idea if we are causing more morbidity and mortality by mass vaccination.
If you want to shut us all up then just do a properly powered retrospective study comparing vaccinated children with COMPLETELY UNVACCINATED ones.
Doctor, if you are reading this, perhaps you will be as shocked as I was when during the Covid pandemic I realized that NO SUCH STUDY has ever been done by the CDC.
They have the data. They have the money. They have tons of analysts working for them. Yet they won't do the study. Why?
Madhava Setty, MD
Everything he says here is an immediate disqualification because he didn't tell patients there is no possible way to have any information about the Covid vaccine and it's long term effects because trials are supposed to run for years, not months. Playing the middle of the road is also why we lost trust in doctors and the system in general, not just the losers pushing it as science. There was no such thing as middle of road for the Covid vax. The truth is no one knew and that should have been expressed to patients.