More New Parents Choosing to Delay Vaccines, Here’s Why

You can always do them later, but you can’t undo what you’ve already done

A new dad reached out to me this week. He and his baby mama were about to take their son to the two-month well-baby visit and they weren’t sure if they should get their wee one all the recommended vaccines or not.

This dad caught me at an off moment.

Usually, I would advise someone like this that they needed to make an informed decision, on a vaccine-by-vaccine basis.

This decision would involve carefully weighing the threat of each disease and the possibility of their baby being exposed to it against the possibility of the baby having a bad reaction to any given vaccine ingredient or to the combined negative effect of the vaccines all given at once.

I would suggest they take their family’s unique genetic profile into consideration, as well as factoring whether the baby was being exclusively breastfed, and if the baby was going to daycare into their decision-making process.

Two dead babies

But I read his email just after I’d hung up the phone with a children’s health advocate based in the Northeast. She and I had been talking about two tiny babies who recently died.