Families need trusted medical guidance on vaccines

As pediatricians and family physicians caring for children across Illinois, we share a fundamental responsibility: to give families medical guidance grounded in the best available evidence. Vaccines remain one of the safest and most effective tools we have to prevent serious illness, disability and death. Decades of research and experience caring for millions of children support the recommendations on vaccine timing. These recommendations are based on how kids’ immune systems develop and learn. There is no new scientific evidence that warrants abandoning that foundation.

At a time when routine immunization rates are declining and measles and other preventable diseases are re-emerging, introducing doubt about proven vaccines has real consequences. Concern and confusion fueled by rumors, not science, can lead to delayed or missed vaccinations, leaving individual children and entire communities more vulnerable.

Parents deserve clear, reliable information. They also deserve the opportunity to ask questions and make decisions with physicians who know their children, their families and their health histories. Parents should know that thankfully, at this time, nothing has changed around access to or insurance coverage of vaccines in Illinois.

As leaders of Illinois’ primary care communities, we stand together in support of evidence-based immunization recommendations and the physicians who put that evidence into practice every day. One child becoming ill or dying from a preventable disease is too many in our eyes. Politics should not determine medical care. Science, evidence and the physician-patient relationship should.

Anita Chandra-Puri, President, Illinois Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics

Corinne Kohler, President, Illinois Academy of Family Physicians