More Parents Than Ever Are Now Starting To Question ‘Routine’ Childhood Vaccines

Want to know what I'm experiencing on the frontlines of medicine? Parents are DONE with giving their kids any and all 💉. Not only that but they're disgusted with what they had already allowed to be injected into their kids. They wish they could turn back ⏰.

— Heather Gessling, MD (@HGessling) August 6, 2022

The Defender reports: In the U.S., children’s and teen’s vaccination rates plummeted dramatically, falling that year by as much as 91% depending on the age group, including a noticeably lower uptake of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccines (DTaP or DTP), meningitis shots and human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines.

Public health officials expected this “pandemic hangover” to dissipate by 2021, but instead, the change in parents’ vaccine-seeking behavior for their kids persisted.

Internationally, 6 million fewer children worldwide got at least one dose of DTP vaccine in 2021 versus 2019, causing the head of UNICEF to lament “the largest sustained drop in childhood immunization in a generation.”

And in the Philippines — where the president threatened to jail COVID-19 vaccine refusers — 2021’s percentage of children receiving a first DTP dose was just 57% versus 92% a decade previously.

Stateside, Washington State reported flu shot uptake in children under age 5 was down by around 25% in November 2021, compared to the two previous flu seasons. And Michigan’s state registry for March 2022 showed that 24% fewer toddlers “were considered vaccinated” compared to March 2020.

When Michigan compared its 2020 vaccination data against the 2016-2019 period, it found vaccination coverage had declined in “all milestone age cohorts, except for birth-dose hepatitis B coverage.”

At this juncture, state officials are openly speculating that COVID-19 shots — thus far rejected by the parents of 97% of under-5-year-olds — are the reason parents are increasingly ambivalent about childhood vaccination more generally.

Referring to this “spillover doubt,” a Michigander public health spokesperson said parents who once accepted childhood vaccination without question are now saying, “Wait a minute. Do I really need these vaccines?” and asking, “How are these vaccines made?”

According to another Michigan official, “vaccination” — the “V-word” — has become a “trigger word” for irate parents who believe government not only overstepped its authority during COVID-19 but is fraudulently pushing unsafe vaccines on their little ones.

Fewer babies dying is no ‘disaster’

In October 2020, three scientists from the U.S. and U.K. authored the Great Barrington Declarationand condemned — quite gloomily — the steep decline in childhood vaccination resulting from COVID-19 lockdowns.

As long-time proponents of vaccination — professionally involved in vaccine development, promotion of the dangerous HPV vaccine and accepting of COVID-19 vaccines as a solution to lockdowns — the three declaration authors positioned the decline in childhood vaccination rates at the head of their list of “disastrous” lockdown consequences.

Far from witnessing a disaster, however, observers by June 2020 had begun noticing a wonderful silver lining — a “surprising” pandemic effect on the death rate among infants, in particular, with 200-plus fewer infants dying per week, amounting to a 30% reduction in expected child deaths within a few months.