{"id":883252,"date":"2026-10-15T14:30:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T14:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/883252\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T14:30:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T14:30:10","slug":"parents-say-theyre-not-anti-vaccine-but-delay-their-kids-shots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/883252\/","title":{"rendered":"Parents say they\u2019re not anti-vaccine but delay their kids\u2019 shots"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez is a primary care pediatrician at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. She hosts the American Academy of Pediatrics Healthy Children podcast<\/a> for parents.\n<\/p>\n

\n Vaccine refusal doesn\u2019t always sound like vaccine refusal in my pediatric office anymore. More and more parents are delaying vaccines and citing logistics, outsourcing the decision to the parent who isn\u2019t in the room or simply wanting more time. I hear countless variations, but the result is often the same: Children leave my office unvaccinated.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cOh, we\u2019re definitely not anti-vaccine. We\u2019re just waiting for Dad.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Dad comes to the next visit. \u201cI think Mom should be here when we do them.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cWe are definitely going to vaccinate but we have a birthday party coming up, doctor; wouldn\u2019t want her to be under the weather!\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Another parent agrees to the vaccines, then slips out of the office before the nurse returns with them because the child is \u201cbeside himself.\u201d Minutes earlier the kid was happily playing in the exam room.\n <\/p>\n

\n Vaccination has become so socially and politically loaded that some parents don\u2019t want to identify with either camp. Rather than explicitly refusing, they postpone.\n <\/p>\n

\n This is a worrisome trend. During the 2025\u20132026 school year, 92.4% of kindergartners in the United States had completed the recommended measles, mumps and rubella series, down from 95.2% in 2019\u20132020. A few percentage points may not sound like much, but it meant 280,000 kindergartners attended school without documentation that they had completed the series.\n <\/p>\n

\n As of early October, the US had recorded 4,080 confirmed cases of measles in 2026 and two deaths, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<\/a>. Compare that with 2,289 cases and three deaths in all of 2025, and only 285 cases and no deaths in 2024.\n <\/p>\n

\n For me, and many of my pediatric colleagues I speak to regularly, it has led to a realization: If the problem is no longer always explicit refusal, then our interventions can\u2019t be solely designed around convincing self-declared vaccine skeptics. We have to get better at responding to \u201cnot today,\u201d and many of us, understanding what is at stake, are working hard to do so.\n <\/p>\n

\n When a parent tells me they\u2019ll vaccinate next time, I respect that choice, but I\u2019m also clear with them about what waiting means: Their child is leaving my office without protection against a disease we can prevent.\n <\/p>\n

\n I also believe when a parent says, \u201cMaybe next time,\u201d their doctor\u2019s office should offer a date and time. \u201cWe\u2019ll do it later\u201d is an intention, while \u201cwe\u2019ll be back on Tuesday at 3:30 p.m.\u201d is a plan. It\u2019s a way to make it as easy as possible to return to get the child protected without calling the parent out.\n <\/p>\n

\n Lately, I also talk to parents a lot more about the diseases we are aiming to prevent than I had in the past. Vaccines have been so successful that many of today\u2019s parents and many young pediatricians have never seen what these diseases can do. Most parents have never watched a baby struggle through pertussis or rotavirus or seen a child hospitalized with complications of measles.\n <\/p>\n

\n When the disease feels theoretical and every alleged vaccine side effect is just one social media search away, how parents calculate risk can become distorted. Recent measles outbreaks<\/a> are a painful reminder that these diseases did not disappear; we stopped seeing many of them because vaccines worked.\n <\/p>\n

\n I am also discussing vaccines as a normal part of preventive care, which they are. Instead of asking what parents want to do about vaccines during their child\u2019s visit, I have shifted to the same assumption we bring to the rest of preventive care: \u201cYour child is due for these vaccines today.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n We discuss the risks and benefits that are part of any recommendation we make, and parents can, and should, still ask questions. They still make the ultimate decision. But in a world filled with falsehoods and other noise, clear communication goes a long way.\n <\/p>\n

\n In nuanced conversations that are far from black and white, I have also found myself tailoring my approach and getting creative. If one parent tells me she needs the other before deciding, we call the other parent together. If both parents truly need more time, then I make sure they leave with reliable information and are part of the next conversation. I have also included grandparents and have even sat through social media videos and group chat posts to answer everyone\u2019s questions.\n <\/p>\n

\n We need our health systems to make saying \u201cyes\u201d to vaccines as easy as possible. That means improving access, streamlining workflows, and allowing more time for counseling parents with questions and concerns.\n <\/p>\n

\n What I see in my exam room makes me wonder whether there may be an emerging group of parents who genuinely support vaccines while actively choosing to delay them. To better understand how to support these parents, researchers need to study that gap, and research requires funding. For pediatricians like me to do our jobs, we need to understand how people actually make decisions about vaccines and how those decisions are changing.\n <\/p>\n

\n At the end of the day, however, I don\u2019t particularly care whether a parent calls themselves pro- or anti-vaccine. Viruses and bacteria don\u2019t care either. What matters is the protection against measles, mumps, rubella, influenza, chicken pox and more \u2014 not the label. For every child to be protected, they need to get their shots, today.\n <\/p>\n

\n Get inspired by a weekly roundup on living well, made simple. Sign up for CNN\u2019s Life, But Better newsletter<\/a> for information and tools designed to improve your well-being.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez is a primary care pediatrician at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":883253,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[97],"class_list":["post-883252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=883252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/883253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=883252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=883252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=883252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}