Why children get so many vaccines

This is the recommended childhood vaccination schedule in the United States. It's a monthly schedule that breaks down the age a child should be vaccinated for common infectious diseases. Here's measles at 12 months and polio starting at 2 months. Here's hepatitis B, recommended often before a baby even leaves the hospital. These are all diseases that at one time came with a host of horrifying side effects. Things like brain damage, paralysis, and even death. And so parents and pediatricians have followed these recommendations for decades. But in recent years, there's been a lot of confusion and concern. More and more parents are choosing to delay or even outright omit parts of the schedule. And to be fair, this can be very overwhelming. Why do young children need so many shots on such a tight schedule? Let's break it down. Well, first of all, I think we do ask a lot of parents in this country. I mean, we ask them to give vaccines that prevent 14 different diseases in the first few years of life. That can mean as many as 25 shots during that time. >> Dr. Paul Offetta is the director of the vaccine education center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. >> I think the skepticism or push back is perfectly understandable. I think it'd be amazing if people didn't push back a little bit on vaccines, >> especially because we're talking about children as young as a day old, which makes giving them shots very scary, but also very necessary. Newborns are one of the most vulnerable populations in healthcare. Their organs are still developing and their immune systems are brand new. >> When you're born, you're you're initially in a virtually sterile environment in the womb, but then when you pass through the birth canal and you're in the world, you're not. This means that babies are especially susceptible to certain diseases. Consider RSV, respiratory sensitial virus. >> There are 60,000 to 80,000 hospitalizations every year in the United States for children who were infected with RSV. >> It's the number one cause of hospitalization in the United States in under one year olds. >> Researchers have been working on a vaccine for this virus since the 60s. In 2023, it was added to the schedule for infants. >> So, we don't recommend it for 5-year-olds. They tend to get a cold when they get an RSV, but under one-year-olds, many of them get hospitalized. >> This is Dr. Jim Campbell, by the way. He's a vaccine expert with the American Academy of Pediatrics. >> We represent the children of the United States, and we want to make sure that what's recommended is what's appropriately recommended to protect children. >> Vaccines offer a safe way to train their new immune systems. And each part of this schedule from the dosage to the timing is curated to do that extremely effectively. Every single part of this schedule has been scrutinized by multiple medical organizations. So when deciding if and when a vaccine should go on the schedule, experts are looking at two main things. One is the disease burden, which is basically the impact of the illness on society. >> What we call the epidemiology. when do you see those diseases and when would it be reasonable to give vaccines based on timing of the disease? >> So you want to make sure the child is fully immune by the time they are most likely to get these infections. >> And two is the immune system itself. When can it launch the best response? For example, babies are born with some temporary measles antibodies from their mom. If a vaccine is given too early, those maternal antibodies could prevent the baby from developing their own. In short, >> the vaccine doesn't work. >> While it's safe to give the measles vaccine earlier, experts have found the optimal time to give it in the US is between 12 and 15 months than again before a child enters kindergarten. And this method has been found to be 97% effective at preventing measles. Extensive research into these two factors, the disease burden and the immune response at various ages are exactly why a child gets so many vaccines so quickly. But this has a lot of parents asking, couldn't all these shots overwhelm a child's very new immune system? >> That's the biggest concern by far. >> There is no way to over quote overwhelm your immune system. >> Our immune systems, even the very new ones, are incredible. Every day we wake up and just by breathing, eating and touching various surfaces, >> we are exposed to thousands and thousands of antigens >> all at once all the time. >> Our body and our immune systems are ready for huge numbers of antigens and it's an important part of what they do is surveil for those antigens all day long. >> Now, if our immune systems are so incredible, what's the big deal if we just let kids build immunity naturally? Isn't that better anyway? >> It is better. It's true. The problem with that is the price that you pay for natural immunity. >> Natural immunity is a gamble and the risk of getting infected with any one of these diseases heavily outweighs the risk of vaccines themselves. Polio led to paralysis in one out of every 200 infections. Before the vaccine, nearly half a million people died or were left paralyzed every year around the world. Hepatitis B can lead to liver cancer or cerosis. 90% of infants who catch HEP B end up with a lifelong chronic infection. And before the measles vaccine, >> there were 48,000 hospitalizations every year for measles. There were 500 deaths from measles, primarily pneumonia, dehydration, and to some extent encphilitis, which is inflammation of the brain. >> Vaccines are on this schedule to remove the gamble. >> I think the term natural immunity is the wrong word. I think the term should be survivor immunity because that would be more accurate. Probably a better question is, is vaccine induced immunity good enough? And the answer is yes. So you can delay or spread out shots, but all that means is more time a child is left unprotected. >> So it is a well- tested, wellhume schedule. A delayed schedule only puts children at increased risk with no advantage. >> Though for some parents, it's not the amount of shots, but what's supposedly in them that leads to uncertainty. Vaccines are typically made up of five components. The most obvious one is the antigen itself, the thing that prompts your body to launch an immune response. Sometimes that's a weakened or dead version of the virus and sometimes it's just a single protein from the virus. >> If you have for example a a viral vaccine like the hepatitis B vaccine that has one hepatitis B virus protein in it >> compared to when a child gets say strep throat where they're exposed to between 25 and 50 antigens at once. A vaccine has way fewer. But mounting confusion comes from these other ingredients in vaccines constantly being cited as toxic. You have sort of this chemopia the minute you say the chemical name like sodium phosphate. I mean sodium phosphate for example may be a buffering agent in vaccines and if you say that to people they don't really know what it means and don't know that they pretty much drink sodium phosphate every day. >> The maracel for example has been making headlines recently. It's a preservative that's been used in all types of products since the 1930s and it contains ethyl mercury which sounds terrifying. But one, theil was removed from all childhood vaccines in 2001. And two, extensive research into this has proven it's safe. >> You saw studies where children who got this dimeol containing vaccine that they they didn't change your blood level of mercury because it was a trivial amount. And no, there is no evidence that it causes autism. Dozens of studies have been done on this topic. There is no link between any vaccine and autism. >> 24 studies have been done at this point. 24 >> vaccines have been proven millions of times over the course of decades to be safe, while the diseases they aim to protect us from are not. In 2025, the US recorded the most measles cases in 30 years. Three people have died. Outbreaks like this are directly related to dropping vaccination rates. >> When immunization rates start to fade, measles comes back. It's a highly contagious disease. And for that reason, it needs a very high rate of immunity, community immunity, herd immunity. >> Maybe you've seen this chart before. It's the number of measles infections dating back to the 1950s. This is where the vaccine was introduced. Here's a similar chart for polio and HIV, a virus that causes menitis. If we can continue to reduce the burden of disease for children through safe and effective vaccines, it's still a passion of ours to continue to find those