‘Definitely not an anti-vaxer’: Some parents push back against recommended vaccine schedule

When Elyse Imamura’s son was an infant, she and her husband, Robert, chose to spread out his vaccinations at a more gradual pace than the official schedule recommended. “Every day you are eligible to get a vaccine that you don’t get one, the chance of an invasive disease remains,” says Dr. Charles Golden, executive medical director of the Primary Care Network at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. She concedes, however: “If there’d been outbreaks like now, it would have affected my thinking about delaying vaccines.” The ideas promoted by Sears and others have contributed to parents’ worries that front-loading shots could overwhelm their babies’ immune systems or expose them to toxic levels of chemicals such as mercury, aluminum and formaldehyde. “Touching another human being, crawling around the house, they are exposed to so many things all the time on a daily basis, so these vaccines don’t add much to that,” says Dr. Pia Pannaraj, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “When you look at babies that have received aluminum-containing vaccines, you can’t even tell the level has gone up,” says Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and director of the hospital’s Vaccine Education Center.