Calli, the current CDC recommended schedule has rotavirus, dtp, Hib, pneumococcal, and polio all at 2 months, then again at 4. These are all separate vaccines. Also, HepB can also be given at 2 months. Maybe no one supports it in principle, but in practice kids ARE getting 5-6 shots in one day. Granted, this probably just means that they’ll be a bit grumpy without any lasting effects, but I thought I should point it out before some anti-vaxer nails you for being uninformed and naively assuming the health care industry is benevolent.

No, these are not neccesarily all separate vaccines; don’t assume that because a vaccine gets its own column, it means you’ll be getting it individually. You *can*, but you don’t have to. I’m looking at my daughter’s records right now; the most she ever got in one day was four vaccines, one of which was the rotavirus vaccine, which isn’t a shot (it’s oral). At her three-month visit, she got Pediarix (DTap-HepB-IPV), PedvaxHIB (HIB), Prevnar 7 (7-valent pneumococcal conjugate), and ROTATEQ (oral rotavirus vaccine). That covers the maximum that the CDC schedule calls for with just three needle sticks and one oral dose.

The anti-vaxxers will tend to look at the theoretical maximum and try to sell it as if the CDC is recommending each of these antigens in a separate vaccine, which is highly disingenuous. Truth is, a lot of these vaccines are actually combined in common practice, even though the CDC lists some of them separately. You can separate them out if you want, but that’s not generally what doctors will recommend unless you have some special circumstances.

“Calli, the current CDC recommended schedule has rotavirus, dtp, Hib, pneumococcal, and polio all at 2 months, then again at 4. These are all separate vaccines. Also, HepB can also be given at 2 months. Maybe no one supports it in principle, but in practice kids ARE getting 5-6 shots in one day.”

I don’t know the schedule in America, but in Australia a child only ever gets three shots maximum and that’s only at 12 months of age.

AS the schedule was expanded, various vaccines were combined so that at no time did they recieve more than three shots:
- HIB was combined with HepB as COMVAX (2 vaccines)
- IPOL was combined with DTP as DTP-IPOL (4 vaccines)
- COMVAX was combined with DTP-IPOL as INFANRIX-HEXA (6 vaccines)

So, at 2, 4,and 6 months children are now given IFANRIX-HEXA, PREVENAR, and ROTARIX, which amounts to two shots and one oral vaccine.

The only time they get three shots is a 12 months when they get MMR, COMVAX, and NeisVacC (meningitis)

But I can understand if you listened to both on the same day. just like I did… though I heard the story before on a Books and Ideas podcast a while ago.

Parents who blame vaccines typically point to a first seizure or some other major anecdote that made them realize that their child was not the same after vaccination.

Well, my first child spent his first week in the hospital due to seizures. So vaccines were not part of the equation.

He went on medication, but was weaned from the meds in a year. Then he had a another seizure just a few weeks later!

Ten years later when there was chatter on the online disability discussion group about the MMR causing problems due to Wakefield’s Lancet paper. So I took a look at his vaccine record, and he had had the MMR only two weeks before the seizure. If it wasn’t for the previous history, I could have connected his last seizure to the vaccine. But there is more to the story.

The reason he had the seizure was because he was dehydrated from a rotavirus infection, and an ear infection. Kind of a double whammy. He was given IV fluids in the ER, antibiotics for the ear infection… along with more follow visits to the family doctor and the neurologist (including more EEGs… that stuff they use to put the contacts on is terrible to get out of a toddler’s hair).

Sometimes I think that some parents misremember many of the details. I think you would have to be very obsessive to write down every milestone, tick and whatever when you have a young child. Much of the first few years of kids is a blur (I’m sorting through pictures of the kids when they were small, and I am coming up blank on names of people and their kids!).

Anyways, here’s a little personal anecdote:

I remember being warned that “Ashland hippies are a breed unto themselves”, and this was fully confirmed when, during the party after one of our shows, I ended up stuck in a conversation with a girl who was going on and on about how the only solution to all the world’s problems was to completely get rid of money.

Now, while I’m sure this doesn’t characterize everyone in Ashland, or everyone at Southern Oregon University (the school in that town), that little experience immediately came to mind when I heard in that Frontline documentary that Ashland has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country.

I really hate to be throwing stereotypes around, but time and again I’ve run into people, especially in college towns, who condemn both science and capitalism as being inherently evil, tools of “The Man”. How does one win over people like that? Is it best to just cynically ignore such foolery, or is it better to keep arguing, thus risking coming across as a bigot? Is this a recent symptom of rampant post-modernism in our universities, or has this been happening for decades?

ccbowers-Esattezza already helped me out the 6 shots in one day bit, but I was just roughly quoting the man from the program, the one who said “f*ck.”

calli-Good information. The epidural idea was a total shot in the dark hypothesis. I may have seen one too many documentaries promoting the natural childbirth movement.

Thanks for your replies, I’ll eventually have something interesting to add to these conversations.