Deciding whether and when to vaccinate your child is an important choice many parents think carefully about. It’s normal to have questions as you weigh information, recommendations, and what feels right for your family. Our goal is to share clear, evidence-based guidance about how vaccines work, their safety, and the diseases they help prevent so you can make informed decisions about your child’s health.
What Are Childhood Vaccines & How They Work
Children have undeveloped immune systems. Newborns get some immunity from their birthing parent, but it wears off throughout the first year of life. Childhood vaccinations protect children against more than a dozen childhood illnesses, giving their immune system a head start.
Vaccines work by imitating an infection to trigger an immune response. It’s like giving the body a preview so it can build defenses against an infection before it strikes. Vaccines contain antigens that elicit an immune response, including the production of antibodies. Depending on the type of vaccine, the antigen could be a weakened or killed virus, a piece of the virus or its genes, a bacterial toxin, or anything that will teach the immune system to produce antibodies.
It’s still possible to become infected after vaccination, especially if the immune system hasn’t had time to build up its defenses yet. But, once vaccinated, infections are usually shorter and less severe.
Top Benefits of Vaccinating Your Children
Life-Saving Protection
Vaccines have led to a significant reduction in many infectious childhood diseases, including measles, polio, whooping cough, and more.
Smallpox used to be a debilitating and deadly disease that killed one of every three children who got it. Today, smallpox no longer exists. It became the first and only human disease to have been completely eradicated through a combination of vaccination and patient tracing.
Other diseases that used to be common, like polio and the measles, have been pushed to the fringes, and there have been increased cases among unvaccinated people and communities, with a surge in cases here in Utah.
Reducing Complications from Disease
Most of the time, vaccinations prevent infection entirely, especially when entire communities are vaccinated, and diseases have no path of transmission. Sometimes, it’s possible to still get infected even if you’ve been vaccinated. These are called breakthrough cases, and they are typically milder and don’t last as long as an ordinary infection.
Kids who are vaccinated are less likely to get infected, and if they do get infected, they’re less likely to have complications like hospitalization, long-term disability, and even death.
Protection for Communities
You’ve probably heard the term “herd immunity,” which refers to the community-level protective effect when almost everyone has immunity. It works like this: if 99 out of 100 people in a community are vaccinated, the one unvaccinated person is also protected because no one else in the community could pass the disease to them.
Not only do vaccinations protect the person being vaccinated, but they also protect the people around them. But it has to be a group effort. To effectively stop the spread of disease, at least 95% of a population needs to have immunity. Herd immunity protects those who are more vulnerable, including infants, older adults, and people with medical conditions who may not be able to receive certain vaccines.
Economic & Social Benefits
In addition to preventing illness, vaccinations improve your and your family’s lives in subtler ways. Kids who are vaccinated are less likely to miss school, and their parents are less likely to miss work. Families who are vaccinated have fewer medical costs and healthier childhood development overall.
Safety of Childhood Vaccines
How Vaccines Are Tested & Monitored
Testing and monitoring of vaccines happens in several stages: research and discovery, proof of concept, vaccine testing, manufacturing process, approval, recommending the vaccine for use, and monitoring.
Research and discovery can take years before moving on to the next stage. The proof-of-concept stage usually involves animal testing, and if things go well, it moves on to the next stage. Clinical testing starts with a small group of 20 to 100 people in phase one, then a larger group of up to 300 people in phase two, and then an even larger group of 1,000 to 3,000 people in phase three.
Once approved, a vaccine might enter a fourth phase, with thousands of people, to evaluate its long-term safety and efficacy. Additionally, several systems monitor vaccine safety once a vaccine is in use:
- The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is an early warning system used by the CDC and the FDA
- Vaccine Safety Datalink
- The CDC’s Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) project
Side Effects & What to Expect
While no vaccine is entirely risk-free, the risk of harm from a vaccine is significantly lower than the risk of harm from an infectious disease.
For example, for every 10,000 children who get the MMR vaccine, there will be 3 or 4 complications, things like fever-related seizures, blood clots, and allergic reactions. By contrast, for every 10,000 children who get the measles, there will be 1,500 serious complications and between 10 and 30 deaths.
Like any medication, vaccines have some risks, but they pale in comparison to the diseases they prevent. In the vast majority of patients, vaccine side effects are mild (soreness at the injection site, fatigue, and mild fever) and resolve within a day or two.
Serious reactions occur in a small percentage of cases. You shouldn’t receive a vaccination if you have a severe allergy to vaccine ingredients or are immunocompromised.
Addressing Common Misconceptions
Myth: Vaccines Contain Harmful Ingredients
Vaccines contain active ingredients to trigger an immune response, along with other ingredients that help to stabilize the vaccine and allow it to be safely administered. It’s also worth noting that any ingredient can be harmful. It’s all in the dose. Ingredients in vaccines are all in human-safe doses.
Myth: Vaccines Cause Autism
The 1998 study, which originally suggested a connection between vaccines and autism, was retracted by the journal that published it for having flawed science. The claim has since been refuted countless times. There is no evidence of any connection between vaccines and autism.
Myth: I Don’t Need to Vaccinate My Child Because of Herd Immunity
Herd immunity only happens when a large enough portion (about 95 percent) of a population is immune. If enough people stop getting vaccinated, diseases we haven’t seen for decades could re-emerge, like we are seeing with measles.
Myth: Children Can Get a Disease from Vaccines
Most vaccines contain dead or weakened (inactivated) disease agents that can’t cause infection. Vaccines that contain live organisms can sometimes cause a mild form of disease. The chickenpox vaccine can cause a rash, for instance, but it’s significantly milder than an actual chickenpox infection.
Myth: Too Many Vaccinations Can “Overload the Immune System”
Some parents are concerned about their babies receiving multiple vaccinations at once. Babies are exposed to multiple antigens every day, and the number from vaccines, even multiple vaccines, is small in comparison to ordinary environmental exposure. It’s perfectly safe for kids to get multiple vaccines at the same time.
What Happens When Vaccination Rates Drop
Vaccinations are one of the most effective medical interventions available to children and adults. They are so effective, in fact, that many of today’s parents are unfamiliar with the horrors of vaccine-preventable diseases. Some might even think that vaccines are no longer necessary because there’s no risk of being infected.
While the risk of getting the measles or other vaccine-preventable diseases might be low, it’s not zero. If too many people decide not to be vaccinated, infections can spread, reintroducing diseases that have otherwise been eradicated.
Unfortunately, child vaccination rates continue to decline. The MMR vaccination rate has fallen to 92.5 percent, below the 95 percent threshold needed for herd immunity. As a result, several measles outbreaks have occurred in multiple states across the U.S.
Infection rates have increased in recent years and continue to increase. For all of 2025, there were 2,267 confirmed measles cases across the United States. As of January 29, 2026, there were already 588 cases. This year is on track to have the highest rate of measles infection in decades, and other rare childhood diseases could become less rare if vaccination rates continue to drop.
While the CDC’s childhood vaccination recommendations recently changed, Wee Care Pediatrics follows the American Academy of Pediatrics 2026 immunization schedule. Please ask your provider if you have questions.
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