Book #65: The Vaccine Book by Robert W. Sears

The picture on this cover should probably be a giant scary syringe or something instead of the cute, curious-looking child that's on there. I picked this book up at the library on the recommendation of a nurse that we talked to, and after hearing about vaccinations from several different people. Although I am totally pro-vaccines, we'd heard enough about the controversies surrounding immunizations that I thought it would be a good idea to at least find out what people were so concerned about. I did some Internet research for a while, but that wasn't really that helpful because most websites just kept saying that people are concerned about the links between vaccines and autism, but there hasn't been anything proven through research, etc. However, this book had a totally different format: Sears went through each individual disease and vaccine and explained what the disease was, how severe it is, how the vaccine is made, when it's given, and why people choose (not) to get it for their child. That individual look at each vaccine (while repetitive--I definitely skimmed huge parts of each chapter) was really helpful and gave me a good idea of what to be worried about and what NOT to be worried about.

Sears also provides a sample alternative vaccine schedule if you don't want to keep your kid on the normal AAP-recommended schedule because of concerns about giving too many vaccines at one time, etc. I was pretty interested in reading that and seeing the differences between the two schedules, although I don't really know if we'll be using a different schedule for Dane (although we'll eventually have to figure this out). Who knew that I would care about this kind of thing? It's not the most interesting thing in the world, but it's good (for me) to feel informed before we go into giving Dane four or five shots at a time at his next doctor's appointment. I do like the idea of postponing certain vaccines that have scary potential side effects, like the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine, but that's one that he won't be getting for a while, so we don't need to decide that yet.