Actress Amanda Peet and her husband wanted to make an informed decision about vaccinating their first child.

“When it was time for our daughter’s immunizations we wanted the facts,” says Peet in a video at VacinateYourBaby.org.
“So we carefully researched vaccines. We spoke with doctors and other experts and asked them tough questions. We decided that vaccines were the best thing for our child.”

Peet, who just gave birth to a second daughter in April, says she volunteered to become a spokesperson for VaccinateYourBaby.com website because it featured the kind of reliable info she and her husband sought when doing vaccine research. She says this research helped her to know vaccinating your baby on time is the right choice.

“I learned that delaying vaccines could jeopardize our baby’s life. Get the facts about vaccines so you can make the best healthcare decisions for your family.”


In January, Landon Carter Dube was spitting up formula and fussy, especially at night. “Was this normal?” his parents asked his pediatrician. Just 5 weeks plus a few days before, “Carterbug” had arrived 3 weeks early, weighing 6 pounds and 6 ounces, with a head full of red hair and “the spitting image of his daddy,” according his mother, Felicia.

A change in formula was recommended with the caution that the change itself could bring on even more spit up. Then Carter developed a fever of 100.1 degrees and back to the pediatrician he went. His nurse practitioner was immediately concerned with his breathing rate and Carter was admitted to Children’s Hospital in Charlotte, North Carolina. The doctors considered RSV, pneumonia, an upper respiratory tract infection and pertussis (whooping cough), with tests ultimately confirming the highly contagious bacterial infection pertussis. Carter was put on oxygen and taken for chest x-rays as doctors suctioned his nose and lungs.

He started to stabilize with the potential for going home until he resumed coughing, lost his breath and turned blue, which led to his being placed on a breathing machine. It would be the last time his family would see him awake. Just 9 days after his mother discovered the low-grade fever, Carter passed away from pertussis.
His family couldn’t believe they had lost him so quickly. “Carter seemed healthy at his check-ups,” says his mom. “We were careful who we let hold Carter, where we took him because of the cold weather in South Carolina and the fear of the flu or swine flu.”

Sadly, Carter’s story tops a long list of similar stories at VaccinateYourBaby.com, the advocacy site of Every Child By Two, the non-profit organization founded by former First Lady Rosalynn Carter and former First Lady of Arkansas Betty Bumpers in 1991 to protect all children from vaccine preventable diseases through timely immunization.

Before the vaccine for pertussis was developed in the 1940s there were about 200,000 cases and 8,000 deaths annually in the US, said Amy Psani, executive director of Every Child by Two. Today, 90% of pertussis deaths are in infants less than a year old. Because it goes largely unreported in adults, the CDC estimates there could be as many as 1 million cases annually.

In 2007, the CDC recommended that all women who are trying to conceive or are postpartum be vaccinated against pertussis with the Tdap vaccine (tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis). The recommendation also extended to any adults who would be providing care for an infant. Infants are most likely to contract pertussis from their caregivers. Adults who were were immunized as a child still need the booster if they’re going to be around infants.

Pertussis is now being seen at “epidemic” levels in both California and South Carolina. This is particularly troubling because the disease tends to be more active annually from July to September, especially in areas where parents are allowed to opt out of vaccines. In June, California reported the first whooping cough epidemic in more than 50 years. Dr. Mark Horton, director of the California Department of Public Health (CDPH), said his state had at least 1,500 confirmed cases – up from 219 the previous year, and 6 infants all under 3 months of age have died to date in California from whooping cough.

Pertussis is the only vaccine-preventable disease that’s on the rise in the US, according to the CDC. With the outbreak of measles last year in New York, experts are asking whether we’re seeing the return of vaccine-preventable diseases as some parents hesitate to vaccinate their kids.

In fact, as many as one-third of all parents may be delaying vaccinations and 12% of parents are skipping vaccines altogether, according to survey results released this spring as part of the CDC’s National Immunization Survey for children born between 2005 and 2007, the latest numbers available.

The most common reasons parents give for delaying or skipping shots include:
Child was sick when shot was due (44%)
Don’t believe vaccines are effective (26%)
Afraid of a possible link to autism (25%)
Concerned that vaccines aren’t safe (24%)


Vaccines create immunity in the person being vaccinated, and they create immunity even for those who are unvaccinated when most people around them have been vaccinated. The whooping cough epidemics emerging this summer illustrate the danger of being left unprotected when groups within a community fail to get vaccinated. For example, in the California pertussis outbreaks, Marin County (near San Francisco) reported the most whooping cough cases. It also has high vaccine refusal rates.

Public health experts say 80% or more of kids ages 3 and younger need to be vaccinated to protect themselves and the community as a whole against more than a dozen diseases. Most parents vaccinate their children on schedule, but when you look at the 6 leading vaccines tracked by the CDC’s National Vaccine survey, vaccination rates are just shy of the goal.

“We’re doing a pretty good job but of course there’s a little bit of room for improvement,” said Dr. Melinda Wharton, acting director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC. “Our national target is 80 percent but it's stable: it’s close to that at 76.1%,” she said.
When parents fail to vaccinate their kids on time, they leave them vulnerable to diseases now rarely seen. While no medical intervention is entirely risk-free, Dr. Wharton said vaccinations are still much safer than getting the diseases they prevent.

“Vaccines can save a child's life and protect them from permanent disabilities. Even with the kind of medical care we have available now, children can still die of diseases like measles,” she said.



MYTH: Now that diseases like small pox, polio and whooping cough seem gone, vaccines aren’t needed anymore.
FACT: The next outbreak is just a plane ride away in our global community: these diseases are still active in other parts of the world, say experts. That these diseases are rarely, if ever, seen in the US means that vaccines are working to keep kids safe. “Pertussis still circulates here and we had small measles outbreaks in the US last year when the disease was introduced by travelers. So these diseases do still occur in the US,” says the CDC’s Dr. Wharton.

MYTH: Vaccines can have dangerous side effects.
FACT: Vaccines are much safer than the diseases they prevent. They can cause side effects that are scary to parents – fever, soreness, swelling and even, rarely, seizures. But research proves that the outcomes of the diseases they prevent would be far worse. “An unvaccinated child who's exposed to a disease is much more likely to become ill than someone who's been vaccinated,” says Dr. Wharton.

MYTH: It’s OK to go slow or skip certain vaccines.
FACT: It’s no coincidence that childhood immunization begins protecting your child from 8 deadly diseases just 2 months after birth. That is when the greatest risk of infant sickness or death exists and vaccines begin to offer some protection as soon as they’re administered. Because it takes more then one injection to provide immunity, the longer you wait the longer your child is at risk from deadly diseases like the flu or whooping cough.