It’s shameful to suggest that vaccines don’t save lives

I spent nearly 50 years of my life treating and preventing serious life-threatening infections in children. My career choice of pediatrics was determined when I met Daniel, a 4-pound baby born a month premature because of exposure to measles. Daniel had severe heart disease, and I spent six months as a medical student in the ICU, trying to keep Daniel’s vital signs as normal as possible, giving him artificial nutrition to allow him to grow big enough to endure his three open heart procedures. I spent six months explaining to his worried parents the myriad health issues that they and Daniel may anticipate in the future.

Fortunately, Daniel was the only infant that I ever took care of to suffer from exposure to measles. Thanks to the development of a vaccine, the disease has been all but eliminated.

The history of vaccinations is a history of lifesaving advances in medicine.

Unlike my parents and grandparents, I and my patients were fortunate enough not to worry about polio and smallpox. These life-threatening infections were pretty much eliminated from parents’ worries by the middle of the 20th century.

In the 1970s, I spent a lot of my professional time treating children in the ICU with spinal meningitis, a severe infection of the brain. Many died and many more left the hospital with severe brain damage. By the beginning of the 21st century, nearly no parent under my care had to watch their child suffer in the hospital from this serious disease. Similarly, by the start of the 21st century and the new millennium, almost no Americans suffered brain damage or heart disease from measles. Thousands of men are not sterile because they have not suffered from mumps.

All of these lifesaving benefits came about only because of the development and nearly universal use of lifesaving vaccines.

As the 21st century progresses, many fewer women will develop cervical cancer, and hopefully fewer children will be hospitalized because of RSV. Why? Because of the development of the HPV vaccine and the emergence of an RSV vaccine in the near future.

Just four years ago, everyday life was disrupted by millions of deaths from COVID-19. What helped bring the end to this pandemic and the return to normal life was the development of a protective vaccine. And the great part of vaccine development is that the scientific procedure to develop these vaccines ensures that before they are brought to mass distribution, they are tested for both safety and effectiveness. This testing is then reviewed by independent researchers to ensure that the data is accurate.

No medical treatment is 100% safe and 100% effective. It is true that, as in all health care, there are rare serious reactions to vaccines, but overall I have seen the health of my patients dramatically improved with the administration of proven vaccines.

During his recently ended campaign for president, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeatedly claimed that vaccines are causing great harm to children and that parents should not be required to give their children these lifesaving treatments. He implied that the risks of the vaccines are so great that parents should consider not allowing their children to have them. And to prove his point, he used examples of tragedies that have never happened — in one instance even placing the photo of a child who died from a condition unrelated to vaccines on the cover of a book without the knowledge or consent of the child’s parents.

RFK Jr. has also implied that autism develops from exposure to vaccines. But after 50 years of practicing pediatric medicine, I think it’s important for the public to know that the risk of autism caused by a vaccine is zero. It is not a low risk; it is zero risk. This is not just my opinion, it is the shared opinion of the scientific and medical communities based on decades of data that clearly show that the risk of autism developing from vaccines is zero.

The Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, has indicated that, if elected, he will offer RFK Jr. a Cabinet-level position, possibly as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

When a politician lies to the public about the severe risks that vaccines pose, that politician is using the bully pulpit to adversely affect the health of our country. There is ample data showing the vast benefit of immunization compared with the small risk of harm. And that risk of harm is mostly from unusual and rare allergic type reactions.

The vaccine schedule recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics is not arbitrary. The schedule was developed to protect infants when they need the protection. There is ample data to show that infants’ immune systems can handle the multiple protections given at a single time and show that any rare reactions do not happen less frequently if antigens are given one at a time. Unfortunately, the needles do hurt a bit, which is why multiple protections are incorporated into each needle.

I beg parents not to listen to the nonsense promulgated regarding vaccine risk. And any public figures who discourage the use of vaccines should be ashamed for risking the lives of our children.

I know that Daniel’s parents would agree.

Dr. Alfred Dushman is a board-certified pediatrician and resident of Clark County.