Vaccine Policy Statement

McKenzie Pediatrics Vaccine Policy

2025

When it comes to child health, prevention is better than treatment. Nowhere is this more evident than with routine childhood immunizations.

Along with clean water programs, childhood immunizations are the greatest public health triumph of the 20th century. Worldwide, tens of millions of lives have been saved by vaccination. Vaccines have saved more lives over the past 60 years than any other single medical advance. Every major world religion is in fact adamantly in favor of vaccination.

However, their stunning success has spoiled us. More than a half century of successful mass immunization programs has vastly decreased these vaccine-preventable illnesses to the degree that we’ve largely forgotten that before the development of many of today’s vaccines, millions of American children annually became infected with viruses and bacteria that too often resulted in serious illness, lifelong disabilities or death.

Most of these diseases still exist, and in our everyday environments. They can be passed on to people who are not protected by vaccines, and they can be just as deadly.

Vaccines are so much the victims of their own success that, in the seeming absence of vaccine-preventable diseases many parents now fear vaccines more than the diseases known to them only vaguely. Some even now imagine and argue that children would be safer without vaccines, because of their rare or entirely fictional side effects.

Yet perceiving the risk of vaccines as greater than the risk of the diseases they prevent is a terrible misperception. Withholding vaccinations because of this misperception is a profound miscalculation, with potentially devastating consequences.

That is why we must continue to be diligent about vaccinating our children. That we rarely see vaccine-preventable illness is owed to the fact that vaccines are working. And they will continue to work only so long as we continue to immunize our children.

Misinformation

Misinformation and allegations of harm from vaccines has become so commonplace that this is beginning to spark outbreaks of diseases (such as measles and whooping cough) once nearly eliminated from the United States by vaccination.

The painful irony to these allegations and the resultant decrease in childhood vaccination rates is that the United States has the safest, most effective vaccine supply in history. Many years of testing are required by law before a vaccine can be licensed.

Once licensed and in use, vaccines are monitored by a comprehensive safety and effectiveness monitoring system that is run jointly by the FDA and CDC. Adverse events (about 10,000 are reported annually) possibly associated with vaccines are investigated and studied, and action is taken when vaccine recommendations need to be changed.

There is little in this world for which we have more scientific data about risk and benefit than vaccines. Quite literally, billions of people have received them. But the risk is not and never will be zero. That’s an impossible standard. However, they are certainly far safer than allowing children to be vulnerable to the diseases they prevent.

And they are far safer than automobiles, bicycles, skateboards, restaurant food and so on. Yet we accept these risks without hesitation.

Based on evidence from the billions of immunizations given worldwide over the past half- century, we know many things for certain: Vaccines do not cause autism. They do not cause diabetes. They do not weaken the immune system. And they do not cause unexpected death in infancy.

Yes, vaccines do have minor side effects. Some children experience soreness, a slight fever, or a local allergic reaction to the antibiotic in some vaccines. Serious side effects, however, are extremely rare. When weighed against the risk of serious complications, permanent disabilities and death from the disease themselves, such side effects seem minor.

Herd Immunity

The benefits provided by most vaccines extend beyond benefit to the individual who is immunized. There is also significant public health benefit. As the old saying goes, when you take up space within a community, you must also pay rent.

By choosing not to immunize, parents actively accept a health risk to their infants and young children that is far greater than any risk posed by vaccines. Parents also may cause situations in which their children pose a serious risk to other children, and to our adult friends, family, neighbors, and elders who are medically fragile or have weakened immune systems.

Such children and adults, living in a well-immunized community, derive significant indirect protection from herd immunity, a collective shield built over decades.

“Herd immunity” means that due to widespread vaccination, the disease has fewer hosts. As the percentage of people who are immunized rises, the transmissibility of diseases declines. Each person who is immunized becomes a firewall against the spread of disease. Each person who is not immunized is not only personally unprotected but weakens the firewall that can stop or slow the spread of disease. When herd immunity erodes, it’s not a matter of if, but when, outbreaks will follow.

However, as vaccine skepticism grows, many who have unwittingly benefitted from herd immunity in the past are now at greater risk – ironically, from themselves. Parents who choose to delay vaccination are not only prolonging their children’s period of risk, but they are also endangering everyone else’s public health.

Parents who refuse immunization on behalf of their children are “free riders”, borrowing the benefit created by the participation and assumption of immunization risk by an overwhelming majority of people.

Refusing to immunize places “personal choice” ahead of civic responsibility. This poses serious unfairness within a community. While parents’ concerns about vaccinations need to be heard and respected, these same parents need to understand that society has a right to expect them to join in the collective responsibility towards “community immunity”.

Our Policy

Having dedicated their life’s work to children and families, pediatricians and family physicians worldwide would have zero motivation to harm children through vaccination. Vaccination programs are not profitable, no clinic or hospital is advocating for vaccinations to make money.

The providers at McKenzie Pediatrics wholeheartedly believe in the safety and effectiveness of modern vaccines and have been around long enough to have seen the devastating effects on children that vaccine-preventable disease can have.

We do not accept children as patients whose parents fully decline all routine childhood vaccinations. We do not wish to place our staff and other children in our clinic, some of whom are medically fragile, at risk of catching a vaccine-preventable disease from an unvaccinated child.

However, we are willing to work with parents to develop a modified vaccine administration schedule, so long as the end goal is the same: fully immunizing the child according to the standards developed in the United States over the past 60 years.

Thank you for reading, and please contact us if you have any further questions.