When I was pregnant, so many friends, acquaintances and co-workers gave me their opinion on vaccinations. Some said wait until your baby is older, some recommended I should research vaccinations because children should not be vaccinated and some recommended I space the vaccinations out.
Before I dive in, please remember I have no medical training and I do not claim to. I am just a mom who researched and made a decision for her baby using that research and her intuition, I found this easy to follow vaccination schedule that the CDC put out (see link below among other articles). I found this especially helpful; because it included, how each vaccination is spread, symptoms associated with it and complications that can result from contracting the disease. This helped aid in my decision to space out vaccinations.
I decided that spacing out the vaccinations would give me peace of mind regarding my baby getting sick. But I also became confident in my decision to space vaccinations out because so many of these vaccinations are the same, just given at different stages. For example, HepB vaccination is given to newborns if parent consents literally right after they make their entrance into this world. My baby got his right after being born. It is then recommended that babies get a second dose at one or two months. This gave me confidence to wait on the HepB vaccination at his two month check up since he already got it as a newborn. In multiple arguments, one thing that stood out to me was overloading the child's immune system which resonated with me. Because their bodies are so new, I found it plausible that my baby's immune system can become overwhelmed with so many vaccinations at once. And to be honest, the idea of being pricked more than once was also unpleasant. I know how my arm feels when I receive a flu shot so why would I want my baby to feel that soreness on both his thighs.
When I was making the decision on which two of the four vaccinations recommended to give my baby, I felt a bit rushed and told that all are important. My response to her was, "I agree but he is a newborn, mostly at home and does not need to be loaded with vaccination all at once". I heard nothing after that. I am a huge believer in responding with kindness and empathy no matter how I am feeling. After all, this is where my child will get his care which means I will be seeing this staff often but that does not mean to take all recommendations blindly. After all, this perfect human is not able to make decisions for himself yet and we as mothers and parents have to protect them the way we know how and with what we are given.
Whatever you decide, know that you can only make the best decision for your baby given the research and to be honest, your gut feeling/ intuition. If you feel like you are made to feel guilty into a specific action then it is probably wise to go back and re-evaluate.
Resources:
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/easy-to-read/child-easyread.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4869767/
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