Jason Terk, a pediatrician in Keller, Texas, called the phenomenon “the other contagion” - a new hesitation or refusal by patients to take vaccines they previously accepted. rural Alabama Houston - pediatricians in all these places told me about similar experiences with parents pushing back against routine vaccines. “It’s very concerning, this lack of trust,” he says. Now, when he cites the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or other official guidelines, skeptical parents sometimes accuse him of being a shill - of having been lied to and taken in by some vast conspiracy. Parents trusted his advice because he was a doctor. “We used to be able to persuade more, with our background and training,” he says. Such doubt has been accompanied by, and may have been augmented by, an erosion of confidence in medical expertise generally. “I think we’re going to see more of this, more spillover of persons who had previously vaccinated their children and who are now not going to vaccinate,” he says. What has happened, he suspects, is that rampant misinformation related to the Covid-19 vaccines, and the fact that pundits like Tucker Carlson on Fox News have devoted a lot of time to bashing them - among other untruths, he has suggested that the vaccines make people more likely to contract Covid-19, not less - has begun to taint some people’s view of long-established vaccines. Some of them are literally rocket scientists at the nearby Lockheed Martin facility. These parents are not uneducated, Froehlke told me.
The overall number of these new doubters in his practice hasn’t been large, he says, but considering it was almost zero before the pandemic, the trend is both notable and worrisome. Some of these parents were even rejecting boosters of the same shots they unquestioningly accepted for their children just a few years earlier.įroehlke estimates that he has faced around 20 such parents, maybe more: a father who said he had done his own research and sent Froehlke a ream of printouts from right-wing and anti-vaccine websites to prove it a mother (who is a nurse) who adamantly refused routine boosters for a kindergarten-age daughter - and then later, when the child got sick with Covid-19, asked Froehlke without success to give the deworming drug ivermectin to her. But until the past nine months or so, he had rarely seen parents with already vaccinated children refuse additional vaccines. He had also seen parents, worried about overstressing their children’s bodies, request that vaccinations be given on different schedules. In his 14 years of practicing medicine in Littleton, a Denver suburb, Froehlke had seen parents decline their children’s vaccines for the sake of a more “natural” lifestyle.
And he didn’t want to drive her away from his practice altogether. But he didn’t press the issue he sensed that she wasn’t persuadable at that moment. “We’re just trying to help your kids be healthy,” he told her. He ushered her out of the examination room, away from her children, and tried to calm her.
“I’m not going to kill my children,” Froehlke recalls her saying, as she began to shake and weep. When their pediatrician, Robert Froehlke, said that it was time for shots and several boosters and then mentioned the Covid vaccine, her reaction stunned him. The mother of four brought her children, ranging in age from grade school to high school, to the doctor’s office last summer for their annual checkup.
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