The CDC recently scaled back its schedule of recommended vaccines, removing vaccines for hepatitis A and B, meningitis, rotavirus, and others in a change that makes the US vaccine schedule look more like it does in countries that have socialized health care, such as Denmark. That change comes as more Americans are choosing to skip or delay certain vaccinations (though most parents vaccinate their children according to the schedules set by health authorities).
Overreach by health authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic reduced trust in institutions. It has not helped that many of those same health authorities recently latched on to claims about transgender medicine for children that aren’t defensible from a scientific perspective, much less a religious one.
Trust is far more easily broken than it is rebuilt, and statements about loving your neighbor are unlikely to convince people who think vaccines are harmful. Yet we should not allow our reactions to government overreach to override our God-given reason and cause harm. With more people refusing the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine, new measles outbreaks have occurred, as well as a handful of deaths—something not seen in the US for decades.
We do have to think critically about the recommendations and pronouncements that come down from the government and major medical associations, because their actions, like all human behavior, may be motivated by ignorance, foolishness, or pride. Most parents will want to follow whatever vaccine schedule the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) puts out, since those schedules are generally based on careful studies of how effective those vaccines are.
There’s nothing wrong with that—in my practice in Kenya, I see plenty of children with pneumonia, diarrhea, and meningitis whose parents wish their kids could get all the vaccines American children are given routinely. But for those who wish to investigate further, I want to suggest a few principles for discerning what’s true.
The first principle: Ask, What are the risks of harm and the potential benefit of a vaccine? I’ll start with an example of a vaccine not recommended for American children: the Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine, given to children all over the world to prevent tuberculosis infections in the brain. My wife and I had to decide when our last son was born in Kenya whether or not to give him the BCG vaccine.
This vaccine, which uses a weakened form of tuberculosis bacteria to protect against infection, has the risk of causing minor problems like a local skin infection, as well as more rare but more serious side effects. I’ve watched patients die of tuberculosis, but I was also nearly killed by a vaccine side effect years ago, so I’ve seen both sides of the equation. We judged that, for our son, the potential benefit of avoiding infection outweighed the risk of harm caused by the vaccine.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (breaking from the CDC) recently recommended that all children 6 months and older who have never had a COVID-19 vaccine get one this year. This recommendation came because COVID-19 vaccines are effective at preventing emergency room visits. The number of children who die from COVID-19 every year is still low enough that there’s not enough scientific evidence to judge whether the vaccination prevents children from dying in the way other vaccines prevent death. For many families, avoiding the risk of a trip to the ER is enough to be worth taking the risk on a COVID-19 shot. For others, it’s not.
The next principle: When you encounter information, ask yourself, How do I know this is true, and what information might I find to falsify it? One common accusation is that insurance companies pay doctors “bonuses” to vaccinate a certain number of patients in their practice. This sounds like pure corruption—doctors getting kickbacks to inject kids!
So let’s ask how we can find out if it’s true—after all, anyone can write a meme or make a video on a cellphone claiming corruption is rampant, but it’s foolish to make a decision that could lead to the death of your child or someone else’s child based on something you saw on the internet. It turns out that insurance companies do pay for “value-based care” for a variety of metrics (such as how well-controlled diabetic patients’ blood sugars are). Childhood vaccination is one of those metrics.
What might falsify this claim of dollars trumping ethics? Well, if insurance companies are as profit-driven as the rest of the health care system is, they only recoup their investment in these value-based incentives if giving vaccines to children saves them money in the long run. And no one has found doctors saying they don’t believe in the CDC schedule but give the vaccines anyway.
Maybe those doctors exist, but here’s a more likely explanation: Doctors administer vaccines they think are good for their patients, and they’re grateful that the money helps cover the cost of storing and administering them. Insurance companies save money when the vaccines prevent children from being admitted to the hospital. No conspiracy or corruption there.
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All of us want stories and facts that justify what we believe, so one of the most countercultural things Christians can do when we encounter new information is to figure out how it could be wrong. Proverbs 18:17 says, “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him” (ESV). When we’re sitting alone with our screens, we should live out this verse by examining information that may seem right at first but doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
We have vaccines available to us that our ancestors who buried young children couldn’t have dreamed of. The recommendations for these vaccines rely on scientific reasoning that is freely available for parents to read and decide for themselves. But if you’re going to do your own research, think first about how to research well.
Matthew Loftus lives with his family in Kenya, where he teaches and practices family medicine at a mission hospital. His book Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond is forthcoming from InterVarsity Press.
