Now it’s vitamin A. *Sigh!*

Okay, the anti-vaxx people are now going around saying that giving your kids vitamin A will prevent measles. Guess what? It won’t! That’s wrong! It’s a lie! (And in fact, giving your kids too much Vitamin A can put them into a coma.) The ONLY thing that will prevent your kids from getting measles is vaccinating them against measles with the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine.

If you have never seen measles or mumps or rubella (aka, German measles, a confusing name which I will not use again) or chicken pox, good for you! That means you’re probably young and you and your parents were vaccinated against them, so you never had to worry about them. But if you think that the fact that you have never seen them means that you will NEVER see measles or mumps or rubella or chickenpox, you’re wrong. Sadly, disastrously, more and more people are choosing not to get their kids vaccinated, and that means that more kids will suffer preventable and extremely painful infections, and that some of them will end up with long term disabilities or may even die.

Since I’m a doctor, you probably expect me to now throw a bunch of statistics at you, right? Nope. I’m just going to tell you some stories.

Part 1: My personal experience with infections we can now prevent

In December of 1961 when I was seven years old, I went to the Plainview Theater near our house with my siblings and my mom to see Walt Disney’s “Babes in Toyland” starring Tommy Sands and Annette Funicello. I had a great time. The movie was very colorful with jaunty music and state of the art special effects. However, when we got home, I wasn’t feeling well, and when my mom looked at me, she started to notice some spots, little red spots. She knew what this meant.

“Well, Kenny, it looks like you have the measles, and you probably gave it every kid in that theater.” That was my mom. It’s not enough that I had a life-threatening illness, but she wanted to make sure she threw a little Irish Catholic guilt in there too.

Still, I guess I was the one who brought measles home to the family. I think my brother David, who was six years older than me, had already had measles, but I’m pretty sure that my younger siblings, Steven and Cathy, probably ended up getting it then. My youngest brother, Jimmy, was only about a month old at that point, and he still was probably protected by mom’s maternal antibodies.

At any rate, over 60 years later, I still vividly remember that light hurt my eyes a lot so I had to stay in the darkened room most of the time. Also, my throat was really sore, making it difficult to swallow. All this went on for about two weeks. I don’t know how my mom made it through it, but she did, and so did we.

Okay. I held off this long. Here are some statistics. The year I had measles, approximately 1,000,000 kids in the United States had it also. About 3000 of them ended up with long-term neurological disabilities. About 1000 of them died. My siblings and I, miserable as we were, were among the lucky ones.

A couple of years later, chicken pox swept through the Haller household. I remember the small blisters coming up all over my body and eventually turning to scabs which were intensely itchy. All of us kids were covered, pretty much head to toe, with calamine lotion to help with the itch, and I had to wear socks on my hands so I wouldn’t dig at the scabs on my face. Even so, I did get a small scar on the left side of my upper nasal bridge because I picked at a particularly juicy scab. That created a divot in the skin which took years to smooth out, largely because once I got glasses, that’s where the nose pad for the glasses would rest.

I’m pretty sure that mumps hit the family when I was in the 5th grade. It happened around Easter, and there is a picture of my sister Cathy with extremely chubby cheeks due to the mumps.  Again, everything shut down in our household for about two weeks while mom slogged through making sure that we remained hydrated because, once again, it was just so hard to swallow anything, including fluids.

I think that I had rubella in the 7th grade. While not as severe as the other illnesses, I was still out of commission for about a week. More importantly, it’s a good thing that my mom was not pregnant at that time. If she had gotten a rubella infection during pregnancy it could have been disastrous for the unborn child with lifelong problems including glaucoma, cataracts, deafness, congenital heart defects, and lifelong intellectual disabilities.

The bottom line is these were once thought of as “common diseases of childhood.” Common, however, did not mean minor. They were common simply because we had no way of stopping them. Now we do. At this point in history, there is no reason for children to suffer or die from any of these infections that millions of us suffered from decades ago.

Part 2: My professional experience with infections we can now prevent

Hemophilus influenza B is a particularly deadly infection for babies and young children. The name comes from, hemophilus, i.e. “blood loving,” because the culture plates upon which it was first grown included blood as a medium. It is a species of bacteria, not a flu virus, but it was most commonly noted to be an infection found in people who were recovering from influenza, thus the name. Hib, as it is generally known, causes two life-threatening illnesses in the very young. The first is sepsis/meningitis. This is a deep infection of the blood and frequently involves the spinal fluid in the central nervous system in newborns and very young babies. This often leads to death, and if a child survives, they often have long-term neurological problems, particularly deafness. A second life-threatening illness is called epiglottitis. This is seen primarily in young toddlers. The epiglottis is a flap of tissue that covers the larynx (the windpipe) when we swallow food that then snaps back up when we breathe, kind of like the pop-up lid on a small garbage can. When Hib infects this structure in young children, it causes it to swell up from a thin flap to something resembling a cherry tomato. This completely blocks the air passage and can lead to death by asphyxiation. When I was in training and early in my practice, I recall attending at least one lecture each fall at whatever academic institution I was associated with on how to tell the difference between croup, a severe but manageable viral illness, and epiglottitis, the much more deadly infection. A mistake early in management can make the difference between life and death in a matter of minutes.

In the mid-1980s this began to change. The first effective vaccine against Hib was released, and in the years that followed the cases of both sepsis and epiglottitis began to fall dramatically. As improved Hib vaccines were developed in the following years, the numbers fell almost to zero. It was, in my experience as a physician, as close to a miracle as I have ever witnessed.

In the years after that, I would see vaccines against pneumococcus, which like Hib cause sepsis and meningitis in young babies, come to market and cause astounding drops in these syndromes. So, for many years teaching residents and students about deep infections caused by Hib and pneumococcus has been almost historical, in that they were unlikely to see these diseases because of vaccination. The past few years, however, these bacteria are staging a comeback, and sadly, learners in health care are getting hands-on experience with something that should no longer exist.

Part 3: The miracle of vaccines and our immune system

“Wow! Isn’t that a lot?” The parent is looking at the vaccine schedule as I explain what we’ll be doing today.

“Yeah! And that’s what’s great! We can now protect your child against so many deadly infections that we weren’t able to prevent even just a few years ago. Your child is really lucky that we can give them this gift.”

When I was a kid, our General Practitioner was only able to give us vaccines against 5 infectious organisms, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (aka whooping cough), polio, and smallpox. (Incidentally, because of decades of dedicated vaccination work, smallpox no longer exists in the wild. No one in the United States has gotten a smallpox vaccine since 1972.)

Now, we give safe and exceedingly effective vaccines against 15 deadly disease-causing organisms before age 24 months. In the teenage years, we add vaccines against HPV to prevent cancer and against meningococcus to prevent meningitis.

When people ask, “Isn’t that a lot?” what they’re really asking is, “Isn’t that too much?” And the answer is an emphatic “No!” Let’s put this in context. Before your baby was born, they were floating around in a germ-free environment. Everything was great. But once the water broke and they started making their way into this messy world, their body begins immediately to encounter dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands, of species of microorganisms: funguses, bacteria, viruses. If you look at your baby now, their immune system is quietly negotiating with all of these species figuring out which ones are helpful, which ones don’t make a difference, and which ones may be harmful. What we do with vaccination is to give their immune system an early warning, a Wanted Poster so to speak, against the most deadly things it might run into.

People will say, “Well, let the child’s immune system deal with this stuff when they’re exposed to it.”

Sorry, that’s what I had to do when I was a kid with measles and mumps and rubella and chicken pox, and it totally sucked. It takes the immune system about two weeks to mount an effective response against a new microorganism, and in that time that bug can do an immense amount of damage. It can even kill your child. Sorry to be blunt, but that’s the way it is.

Look at it this way. The United States has the Department of Defense with all kinds of weapons that can be deployed at a moment’s notice using intelligence gathered from other countries against specific sorts of threats that may come from there. So when a threat comes our way, we can counter it ASAP because we know the exact right response in that situation immediately. To let your child’s immune system handle it on its own would be like saying, “Let’s dismantle the Department of Defense, and when Russia starts shooting nuclear missiles at us, contract with corporations to build some missiles and bombs to send back to them. But wait. Won’t we be dead by then?”

Exactly.

As of today, Wednesday, March 5, 2025, there are at least three distinct measles outbreaks occurring in the United States across nine states. At least 164 people have been diagnosed with measles, and one child has died of measles. Despite RFK, Jr. saying that these sorts of outbreaks are “common,” they are not, and we should never, ever let them become common. What they are is completely preventable. But unfortunately, we are going to see more of them if people continue to ignore decades of established, reliable, prudent public health policy, and don’t vaccinate their kids.

Conclusion

I started my pediatric residency on July 1st, 1981, over four decades ago. Since that time, I’ve seen tens of thousands of children and families. I’ve studied, I’ve worked hard, I have given up nights and weekends and holidays to care for your kids. And I am not the exception. Every pediatrician I know goes above and beyond to do their absolute best for the children we care for. So please, please believe me when I say that I know what I’m talking about and that I want the best for your children and that I would NEVER recommend anything that would hurt them. And please know that I am telling you the truth when I say that, in over forty years of caring for your children, I have never, ever seen a child who has had a bad outcome from getting a vaccine. But I have seen children suffer and even die from diseases that vaccines would have prevented. And it breaks my heart.

As parents, you have the power to resist the lies, the misinformation, the disinformation. It is in your power to give your children the gift of vaccination. It is by far the most loving thing you can do for them. I pray that you make that choice for their future.

Published March 7, 2025