Parents, don't be immune to vaccine truths

But that combination -- being very sick and unvaccinated -- had led this child to the edge of respiratory failure, confined her to the hospital for a week, subjected her to many invasive tests and left her parents sleepless and scared. To top it all off, every person who had been in contact with her in the hospital was forced to take preventive antibiotics so we wouldn't get sick and spread whooping cough.

Refusing health

In the decade since that episode, vaccine refusal has become a trend in many places, including Southern California. As a recent Times article shows, that trend is particularly marked in affluent areas.

By now, most people know that many parents are refusing to vaccinate their children because they're scared that vaccines cause autism. They've heard the public rants of people who form a small but vocal and well-financed minority in the autism community and been frightened by them. Actress Jenny McCarthy, for example, who has had her share of appearances on "Larry King Live" and "The Oprah Winfrey Show," has screamed (literally) that she would rather children get measles than autism. At best, that's a false choice; at worst, it's a sick, horrible wish for her or anybody else's child.

You may be a parent reading this, unsure of what to believe when it comes to vaccines. I've had parents break down crying because they simply didn't know what to do.

And you know what? You have every right to be confused.

That's because doctors like me haven't been very good at communicating with you. For a long time, many of us blew off questions and concerns about vaccines. By the time we did start listening, sometime around the middle of this decade, we were way behind the curve. "Investigative reports," such as those produced by author David Kirby and environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., condemned vaccines and the doctors who recommended them. .

We doctors, in contrast, were unsure of ourselves, even as a growing body of studies proved, time and time again, that vaccines (and things in them) were not causing autism. We clumsily scared the public by abruptly taking thimerosol out of vaccines in 2001, even though there was no science to support such a move. When McCarthy first showed up on "Oprah" and "Larry King" in 2007, we responded with coldly worded, bureaucratic statements.

Doctors respond