se Control and Prevention (CDC) web site (cdc.gov) and go to the section on vaccines. Another valuable resource is the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) web site (aap.org) which also contains an extensive section on vaccines. These two resources contain a tremendous amount of information that supports the current immunization schedule.
Many parents will read something that discusses the negative sides of vaccines. Our most important advice to you in this regard is that you stay away from the internet as many of the resources there are not responsible in their discussions and claims.
It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss all of the scientific support for vaccinating your child. One thing which can be said unequivocally is that an immunized community is significantly safer from a communicable disease than a community which is not immunized. The risk to the community from immunizing itself against a particular infectious disease is dramatically less than the risk which that disease poses to the unimmunized community. The fact that significantly more children will be harmed by an epidemic in an unvaccinated population than would ever have been harmed by the vaccinations, is the basis on which public health officials make their recommendations to vaccinate everyone. While this fact may comfort these officials in making their recommendations, it doesn't comfort those parents whose children suffered significant adverse effects from being vaccinated. This is why there is a controversy.
In our experience, parents fall into one of three basic categories. The majority of our families are so comfortable with their knowledge of vaccines and/or conventional medical science that they elect to vaccinate according to the recommended schedule. Second, there are those parents who after doing more research are still unsettled and many of them either do a partial vaccine program (taking the ones they feel the strongest about) or they may delay starting the vaccines to a later date. Finally there are those who, after their investigation, feel most comfortable with no vaccines at all.
The laws which govern parents in Colorado allow you to determine your own personal course of action with vaccines. However the laws which govern physicians require us to recommend the full vaccine schedule as designed by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) under the auspices of the CDC.
We deeply respect each individual parent's right to choose how to proceed with vaccinating their children. If you decide to do anything less than the recommended schedule, we will require that you sign an informed consent waiver which clarifies that your decision and its risks are solely your responsibility and that we are not accountable for any adversity should your child suffer from a disease for which there is a vaccination. If you do elect to do a delayed start to the vaccines or a partial vaccination program, we then consider it an ethical contract on your part, as the parents, to insure that the vaccines are administered on the schedule. We will help to create a schedule with you which may involve office visits that are not on the regular "Well Child Care" schedule. We allow parents to alter the starting time of the vaccine but mandate that you stay on the correct administration schedule once you have begun.
Finally, we would like to suggest one last thought. Vaccines, despite all of the controversy, have saved thousands of lives and many more thousands of permanent adversities. Once you decide to vaccinate your child, embrace the vaccination as a gift of nature and science. Help us place it into your child's body with the same loving energy you would give to your child while feeding them. In our opinion both you and your child will respond more favorably to the vaccine with this kind of loving energy.
We know that this is a big decision and we hope that this discussion will help by at least giving you a perspective and a framework within which to make this decision. We hope you arrive at a comfortabl