After my son was born in December, new parent questions consumed my thoughts. Is he sleeping enough? Is he screaming because he’s hungry or his diaper is dirty? And is poop normally that color?
Now that I’ve somewhat mastered those questions, and he’s sleeping through the night, I’m still up obsessing over a new issue: Vaccines.
My worries spiked when an outbreak of measles flared up in West Texas in late January. Two unvaccinated children have died. Then funding cuts brought many clinical trials, including ones for new vaccines, to a halt. In May, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration took steps to limit COVID-19 vaccines to adults ages 65 and up and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that the vaccine was no longer recommended for healthy children and pregnant women. (For now, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says those groups may still receive the vaccines.)
And on June 9, Kennedy, a known vaccine skeptic, removed all current members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices. The panel makes recommendations for how and when vaccines should be used, including setting the childhood vaccine schedule and determining who’s eligible for COVID-19 shots. Its recommendations ensure vaccine access and are the basis for what shots insurance will cover.
While Kennedy says he plans to reconstitute ACIP, the move intensifies the uncertainty around the future of vaccines and whether the U.S. government will continue to recommend some lifesaving shots. The panel is poised to meet June 25 to 27 to discuss a variety of vaccines, including the rollout of an updated COVID-19 shot for the fall.
“Up until a couple of months ago, vaccine policy in the United States was generally science-based and not political,” says Kawsar Talaat, a vaccine researcher and infectious diseases physician at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We’ve had political interventions here and there, but overall vaccine policy and recommendations are science-based, and the involvement of politics in something that should be evidence-based is quite concerning.”
My husband and I — both trained as scientists — know to follow the data. We took steps to protect our newborn from the litany of winter-circulating respiratory diseases by restricting visitors and asking our family to get COVID-19, whooping cough and flu shots. I got my own vaccines, as well one for RSV, while pregnant. My body shared the antibodies that it made with my son, protecting both of us in one fell swoop.
“Vaccines are incredibly safe and save lives,” Talaat says. “And we have gotten complacent, I think, because … you can’t see something that you are preventing.” But to put a number to it, vaccination has prevented 154 million deaths globally since 1974, researchers reported May 2024 in the Lancet. Of those prevented deaths, 101 million were among infants younger than 1 year old.
Still, as more reports of measles cases emerged from Texas and beyond, I worried that an outbreak might pop up where we live and that our too-young-to-be-vaccinated baby could be exposed. I wanted to know my options.
Weighing getting an early measles vaccination
Children become eligible for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine at 1 year old. Through frantic Googling, I learned that babies living in areas with an outbreak or those traveling internationally can get the shot as early as 6 months old. At our son’s 4-month checkup in April, his pediatrician confirmed that he could get the MMR vaccine early if we wanted. He would still follow the usual series of shots, receiving one after his first birthday and another after he turned 4.
I checked out the pros and cons of an early MMR vaccination with pediatric infectious diseases physician Brenda I. Anosike of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.
An early dose can reduce the risks of severe disease and complications such as pneumonia or brain swelling if an infant is infected, she says. But vaccine protection isn’t as robust in children younger than a year.
“That is why we don’t willy-nilly try to give every single person the vaccine at 6 months of age,” Anosike says. Antibodies passed from mom to baby “can actually interfere with the vaccine itself,” blunting the baby’s immune response. It’s better to wait until protection from mom fades away.
The measles outbreak — which has reached 1,168 confirmed cases in 33 states, according to the CDC — seems to be slowing. And while the CDC issued a travel advisory on May 28 recommending that all adult international travelers should be fully vaccinated for measles and young infants should get an early dose, we are not traveling soon. Measles vaccination rates where we live have fallen below the herd immunity threshold of 95 percent but remain above 90 percent. Our risk, thankfully, remains low.
With that information in hand, we decided to forgo the early extra MMR dose. It makes sense for babies at high risk of exposure to get vaccinated early to prevent severe disease, says Lori Handy, an infectious diseases pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. But “if it’s still highly unlikely you’re going to be exposed to measles, then you want to get your dose at the time when it’s going to work the best, which is at one year of age.”
Trying to get a COVID-19 shot
Although my son probably won’t face measles, experience from previous years suggests a summer surge of COVID-19 may be around the corner. Yet it’s unclear whether I’ll easily be able to get my son vaccinated soon.
In addition to confusion about who is eligible for COVID-19 vaccines, a new HHS plan would require new vaccines to undergo placebo-controlled trials. All vaccines already do, but the plan has raised questions about whether seasonal updates to approved flu and COVID-19 shots would need to be tested. Such trials take time, making it difficult to update the shots each year to better match the viral strains that are circulating.
Conflicting messages from public health officials are already posing hurdles. Infectious diseases physician John Lynch of the University of Washington in Seattle recently advised a pregnant colleague to get vaccinated. When she tried, she was turned away by two pharmacies. “That’s the practical implication of this,” Lynch told reporters June 6 in a news briefing organized by the Infectious Diseases Society of America. People who want protection may lose access.
Infants under age 1 year, and especially those younger than 6 months old, are among the groups more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19. Hospitalization rates for babies less than 6 months old across 12 states from October 2022 to April 2024 were roughly the same as adults ages 65 to 74, researchers reported September 2024 in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Most of those hospitalized infants were born to mothers who had not been vaccinated.
Vaccines are the best protection against hospitalization or dying from COVID-19, says Handy, an associate director of CHOP’s Vaccine Education Center. “For young babies who don’t have the immunity that we all have from living through the pandemic, we would much rather their first exposure be through vaccine than through natural infection.”
I would also prefer my son’s immune system learn how to fight infection from a vaccine instead of the virus itself. Unfortunately, his pediatrician’s office didn’t have the vaccines on hand at his 6-month appointment. Vaccination rates among children are generally low — fewer than 20 percent of kids under 18 got the most recent COVID-19 shot, according to the CDC. So most offices don’t regularly have them, my sources told me. My next task will be calling pharmacies asking if they’re willing to give him the shot. I hope it’s not too difficult to find one.