Doctors, too, bear part of the blame for drop in kids getting childhood vaccines
I’m not alone when I confess that the COVID era wreaked havoc on my kids’ annual pediatrician visits.
In the early months of the pandemic, when the virus was still a big unknown and doctors’ offices were trying to limit contacts, doctors canceled all our long-scheduled wellcheck visits.
Later, pediatric office policies that allowed only one parent to accompany one child per visit, made going to the doctor a nearly impossible task. It often required a baby sitter or some other form of hard-tofind childcare, and that typically meant those appointments also needed to be rescheduled at least once. And every parent knows that many of these visits need to be set many months in advance.
Even three years later, some medical offices’ insistence that we wrangle a screaming toddler into an all-but-useless face covering has made going to the doctor as daunting for the parent as the child and understandably something we might want to delay.
But pandemic-era doctors’ appointments that were missed or repeatedly delayed often meant that, for many kids, the vaccines for ordinary childhood illness were, too.
That was predictable and understandable. And vaccination rates have largely rebounded as the pandemic has waned. That’s a good thing. If there’s any decline or stagnation in the rate of children who are up to date on their normal vaccine schedule, doctors are quick to blame an increase in vaccine hesitancy driven by misinformation and questions about the COVID-19 vaccine — which has had remarkably slow uptake for the youngest kids.
They cast aspersions on ignorant parents and socialmedia misinformation campaigns, but they seldom acknowledge their own role in creating an environment in which parents are increasingly wary about the accuracy of the information they are receiving from healthcare professionals.
They seem to have memory-holed the months of public health officials telling us things that ended up not being true. Like the initial claims that the vaccines prevented infection and stopped the spread of COVID. The vaccines prevented serious illness and hospitalization and minimized, but did not stop, contagiousness.
Now, they are finally acknowledging that the likelihood of contracting COVID, even after four shots, probably is inevitable, a fact punctuated by President Biden’s recent bouts with the illness.
The president, whose age makes him high-risk (unlike most children), appears, thankfully, to be weathering COVID, even after a “rebound” infection. But there is no way of knowing for certain if that is a function of his many vaccine shots, use of the drug Paxlovid or the mild nature of the variant he contracted.
Public health officials’ continued insistence that masking and ever-more boosters are needed to end the spread of a virus that most of us have had and survived has a hollowness that rightly makes people more skeptical of the medical information we are receiving.
And that skepticism has understandably trickled down into the daily medical choices we make, even about things such as traditional childhood vaccines that never once gave most of us a second thought.
As demonstrated by the recent revelatory review by University College London that pushed back on the long-held belief that depression is caused by a serotonin imbalance in the brain, medical knowledge is in constant flux.
Science, as they say, is seldom settled, and doctors and health officials would better serve the public by regularly saying so. It would be good for doctors and parents to have a more open and honest dialogue about even routine medical practices and procedures.I
It would certainly increase my confidence in getting our well-check appointments back on the calendar.
Cynthia M. Allen is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. ©2022 Fort Worth
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