Category: Vaccine Advocates

Best Vaccine Websites

Need to do your research and get educated about vaccines?

There are plenty of great vaccine books to turn to.

Best Vaccine Websites

Rather use the Internet?

Caveant lector et viewor — Let the reader and viewer beware.

Silberg et al, on Assessing, controlling, and assuring the quality of medical information on the Internet

Unfortunately, you can’t just trust any website that pops up at the top of your search results on Google, Bing, or Yahoo or that is shared by a friend on Facebook. Some of these sites might push misinformation about vaccines and be filled with anti-vaccine talking points.

Whether you are on the fence or just have a few questions, instead of feeling lucky that Google will lead you to trusted information, start your research about vaccines on the following websites. They are the most reliable and trusted sources of immunization information you will find.

  1. American Academy of Pediatrics
  2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
  3. World Health Organization
  4. Every Child By Two
  5. EZIZ
  6. Families Fighting Flu
  7. Gavi The Vaccine Alliance
  8. Harpocrates Speaks
  9. History of Vaccines
  10. Immunise Australia
  11. Immunisation Scotland
  12. Immunization Action Coalition
  13. The Immunization Advisory Centre
  14. Immunize Canada
  15. Immunize for Good
  16. Institute for Vaccine Safety
  17. I Speak of Dreams
  18. Just the Vax
  19. Left Brain Right Brain
  20. Measles & Rubella Initiative
  21. Moms Who Vax
  22. National Foundation for Infectious Diseases
  23. National Meningitis Association
  24. NHS
  25. Northern Rivers Vaccination Supporters
  26. Nurses Who Vaccinate
  27. Parents of Kids with Infectious Diseases
  28. The Poxes Blog
  29. Pro-Vaccine Parenting Group (Facebook)
  30. Shot of Prevention
  31. Skeptical Raptor
  32. TIP Talk
  33. Vaccinate Your Family
  34. the Vaccine Blog
  35. Vaccine Education Center
  36. the Vaccine Mom
  37. the Vaccine Page (Facebook)
  38. Vaccines on the Fence (Facebook Group)
  39. Vaccines Work
  40. Voices for Vaccines

Other websites that are also reliable sources of immunization information, but don’t focus on vaccines include:

Get all of your questions answered yet?

Your pediatrician should also be a good resource for questions about vaccines.

Evaluating Vaccine Websites

Be skeptical if looking elsewhere.

Some general questions experts recommend asking, and which will certainly help when visiting a website about vaccines, include:

  • Who runs the Web site?
  • Who pays for the Web site?
  • What is the Web site’s purpose?
  • What is the original source of the Web site’s information?
  • How does the Web site document the evidence supporting its information?
  • Who reviewed the information before the owner posted it on the Web site?
  • How current is the information on the Web site?
  • How does the Web site owner choose links to other sites?

Fortunately, anti-vaccine websites are fairly easy to spot.

Anti-vaccine websites often filled with conspiracy theories, talk about BigPharma, and about how everyone else is hiding the truth about vaccines.
Anti-vaccine websites often filled with conspiracy theories, talk about BigPharma, and ideas about how everyone else is hiding the truth about vaccines.

They are often filled with vaccine injury stories and articles about how vaccines are filled with poison (they aren’t), don’t really work (they do), and aren’t even needed (they certainly are).

Tragically, their pseudo-scientific arguments can sometimes be persuasive, especially if you don’t understand that they are mostly the same old arguments that the anti-vaccine movement has been using for over 200 years to scare parents away from vaccinating and protecting their kids.

What to Know About the Best Vaccine Websites

With current information, a clear purpose (informing users, not selling supplements in an online store), and authors who are well-respected, our collection of the best vaccine websites can help you get educated about vaccines from a trusted source.

More on the Best Vaccine Websites

Parents Who Regret Not Vaccinating Their Kids

My uncle got polio just before the vaccine was developed. He was hospitalized for six months, almost didn't survive, and lived with atrophied muscles in one of his legs.
My uncle got polio just before the vaccine was developed. He was hospitalized for six months, almost didn’t survive, and lived with atrophied muscles in one of his legs.

A rather strange anti-vaccine argument you might sometimes hear is that you can’t unvaccinate your kids (even though they push detox plans that say they do exactly that), so go ahead and wait to vaccinate them until you have “done your research” and are sure.

The problem with that argument, like most others that anti-vaccine folks use to justify their decisions to skip or delay vaccines, is that you can wait too long.

“In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the smallpox taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of the parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.”

Benjamin Franklin Autobiography

Tragically, Ben Franklin wasn’t the last parent to regret not vaccinating his child.

More Parents Who Regret Not Vaccinating Their Kids

Roald Dahl, who famously wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is less well known for having a daughter who died of measles. It was just before the measles vaccine came out, so he didn’t regret not vaccinating her, but in urging other parents to protect their children, he did seem to regret that a vaccine wasn’t yet available.

For many other parents, a vaccine was available that could have kept their kids from getting sick.

“In 1989, the Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccine was relatively new and not yet routine. I was aware of the vaccine’s availability, but, busy mom that I was, I had not yet made the trip to the health department to get the immunization for my two-year-old daughter, Sarah. I will always regret that bit of procrastination and the anguish that it caused.”

Peggy Archer

Some of them have shared their personal stories, including the parents of:

  • Abby Peterson‘s “pediatrician steered her away from vaccinating her daughter” against chickenpox and her mother, Duffy Peterson, now says that “she wishes she had questioned the doctor’s recommendations more forcefully.” Abby died of a chicken pox infection.
  • Emily Lastinger who was unvaccinated and died of flu.
  • After all seven of her unvaccinated kids caught whooping cough, this parent regretted not having them vaccinated.
  • Claire Noelle Bakke who got pertussis when she was five weeks old
  • Scarlet Anne Taylor who died of the flu during the 2014-15 flu season
  • this unvaccinated three year old who spent six days in the hospital (part of it in a slight coma, during which they weren’t sure he would survive) with Haemophilus influenzae type b epiglottitis
  • Abigail who was unvaccinated and died of invasive pneumococcal disease
  • these two unvaccinated kids who developed severe dehydration from rotavirus infections
  • Sarah who was unvaccinated and developed a croupy cough when she was two-years-old and ended up on a ventilator with Haemophilus influenzae type b epiglottitis
  • Ashley who died from the flu and had never gotten a flu shot
  • Evan who died of a vaccine-preventable disease because his mom was not told about the vaccine that could have prevented it

There is another group of parents who have regrets about vaccines. Those parents whose kids can’t be vaccinated (too young to be vaccinated, have cancer, or have another medical exemption, etc.) are put at risk and exposed to vaccine-preventable diseases by intentionally unvaccinated kids. These parents typically regret that those around them don’t get vaccinated and protected.

Your decision to get educated and vaccinate your family shouldn’t be based on fear or concerns of regret if you delay or skip any vaccines, but these types of personal stories are important to review, especially if you also hear, watch, or read any stories about vaccine injuries.

What To Know About Regretting Not Vaccinating Your Kids

Delaying or skipping one or more vaccines isn’t safer or healthier, it just puts your child at increased of catching the vaccine-preventable diseases the vaccines protect you against and might lead to feelings of regret if you wait too long.

More On Parents Who Regret Not Vaccinating Their Kids

Paul Offit

Paul Offit, MD, FAAP is a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist, completing his training at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

If people choose not to get vaccinated it’s because they’re not scared of the disease, and they have false concerns about what the vaccine can do.

Paul Offit, MD

His abbreviated resume is 34 pages long…

Paul Offit's books will help you do real research about vaccines.
Paul Offit’s books will help you do real research about vaccines.

In addition to being the co-inventor of RotaTeq, one of two rotavirus vaccines in use today, Dr. Offit is the director of the Vaccine Education Center and a professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Even more importantly, whether it was his appearances on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report and other places in the media, his free vaccine course, or the 150 papers he has published in medical and scientific journals, Dr. Offit has been a leading force in educating pediatricians and parents about the importance and safety of vaccines

His books and articles are essential reading, especially for health care providers and parents who might be thinking about skipping or delaying one or more vaccines. They include:

  • Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure
  • Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All
  • Vaccines and Your Child: Separating Fact from Fiction
  • Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine
  • Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine
  • Vaccinated: One Man’s Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases
  • The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to Today’s Growing Vaccine Crisis

Not surprisingly, he is a frequent target of anti-vaccine groups.

It also shouldn’t be surprising that all of their attacks are very easily debunked.

For More Information on Paul Offit:

Who is Tom Frieden?

CDC Director Tom Frieden in West Africa during the Ebola epidemic.
CDC Director Tom Frieden in West Africa during the Ebola epidemic.

Thomas Frieden, MD, MPH has had a long career in public health, working as Commissioner of the New York City Health Department and most recently as the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr Frieden went to Oberlin College, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and did his residency in internal medicine at Yale University.

The field of public health aims to improve the health of as many people as possible as rapidly as possible.

A responsive government can maintain that people are responsible for their own health while also taking public health action that changes default choices to make it easier for people to stay healthy.

Dr. Frieden on The Future of Public Health

During his career, he:

  • worked to reduce rates of cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis by 80 percent in New York City
  • assisted the national tuberculosis control program in India
  • directed efforts to reduce smoking, including teen smoking, in New York City
  • led the response to the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic in the US
  • has pushed for more funding to help control and treat Zika, which he says will likely “become endemic in this hemisphere”

Perhaps most importantly, and despite some criticism, Dr. Frieden led the CDC during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. An epidemic that spread to the US and other countries and for which the “CDC has undertaken the most intensive outbreak response in the agency’s history.”

Recently, he has also highlighted “two shortcomings of our health system,” that the upward trend in life expectancy that we have seen over the past 50 years (about 9 years), “is neither as  rapid  as  it  should  be  —  we  lag  behind  dozens  of  other  nations – nor is it uniformly experienced by people in the United States.” And that is because “life  expectancy  and  other  key health outcomes vary greatly by race, sex, socioeconomic status, and geographic location.”

And after working to eliminate trans fats from restaurants in New York City and have chain restaurants post calorie information on their menu boards, he has continued to confront many of the more modern era epidemics, like obesity, hypertension, and diabetes.

He resigned from the CDC on January 20, 2017 and was replaced by Anne Schuchat, MD, who became the  became Acting Director.

For More Information on Thomas Frieden

Updated January 22, 2017

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Celebrities Who Advocate For Vaccines

Some of the first celebrities to advocate for vaccines did so to help combat polio.

lucy-desi-polio
In 1954, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz asked everyone to “give every dime and dollar” they could spare to fight polio.

From Grace Kelly to Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, stars lined up to support the efforts of the March of Dimes to end polio, with celebrity comedian Eddie Cantor leading the way.

Joan Crawford, Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Red Skelton, Johnny Cash, Jack Benny, Bing Crosby, and many others were a part of the Polio Crusade.

Before that though, there were celebrities that were working to fight smallpox. Celebrities of the time like Lewis Carroll, who is best known for writing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

There are, not surprisingly, many pro-vaccine celebrities now too.

  • Kristen Bell
  • Ewan McGregor
  • John Oliver
  • Jennifer Garner
  • Olivia Wilde
  • Amada Peet
  • Lenny Kravitz
  • David Beckham
  • Keri Russel
  • Julie Bowen
  • Serena Williams
  • Salma Hayek
  • Christy Turlington Burns
  • Kim Kardashian
  • Jennifer Lopez
  • Kristi Yamaguchi
  • Marc Anthony
  • Sarah Michelle Gellar
  • Kendra Wilkinson
  • Marissa Jaret Winokur

And like Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in the 1950s, many are working with organizations to help fight vaccine-preventable diseases and protect children.

Many, like Ewan McGregor and Salma Hayek, work with UNICEF.

Others promote flu vaccines, combat pertussis, or simply fight the anti-vaccine misinformation that is that out there.

For More Information On Celebrities Who Advocate For Vaccines:

Maurice Hilleman – The 20th Century’s Leading Vaccinologist

Do you know who Maurice Hilleman was or what he did?

He once said that:

Preventative medicine, and little else with the possible exception of antibioitcs, has brought about the lengthening of the average human lifespan to the Biblical threescore and ten years. Among the most potent and effective weapons in accomplishing this longevity have been the vaccines.

If you don’t who he is, you will likely be surprised that he is often described as the:

  • unsung giant of vaccinology
  • greatest vaccinologist
  • 20th century’s leading vaccinologist
  • greatest scientist of the 20th century
  • father of modern vaccines

Tragically, he has also recently been described as the MMR vaccine’s forgotten hero.

Even though he developed 8 of the 14 most commonly used vaccines that save at least 8 million lives a year, few people know about him or that he developed the measles, mumps, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, meningitis, pneumonia, Haemophilus influenzae bacteria, and rubella vaccines.

You might even be more familiar with his daughter, as the Jeryl Lynn strain of mumps virus is in the current mumps vaccine. Hilleman developed the mumps vaccine after culturing the virus from his sick daughter, Jeryl Lynn, and then attenuating the virus.

With all he did, it’s not surprising that Bill Gates called Hilleman one of the most influential vaccine heroes.

Maurice Hilleman also:

  • defined antigenic drift and shift for influenza
  • discovered and purified interferon
  • identified adenovirus
  • discovered SV40

All together, he developed 40  experimental and licensed animal and human vaccines.

Hilleman once called Jenner, Pasteur, Koch, von Behring, Ehrlich and Lister giants of their time – the late 18th and 19th centuries.

Similarly, Maurice Hilleman was, without question, a giant of our time.

For More Information on Maurice Hilleman:

Walter Orenstein on Vaccines

Walter Orenstein is a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist who also completed a residency in preventive medicine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Although I mostly trained in the post-vaccine era, it is easy for me to understand Dr. Walter Orenstein’s quote about Hib disease:

for those trained in pediatrics in the 1970s, Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type b) was a horror.

He is talking about all of the cases of epiglottitis, bacterial meningitis, and pneumonia that pediatricians routinely saw that were caused by Hib. Just before the first Hib vaccine came out in 1988, just over 250 young children died each year of Hib disease.

While the kids I saw in training were all vaccinated with Hib and didn’t get epiglottitis, the older doctors in the ER always considered the diagnosis whenever we presented a severe case of croup. And there were still notices about the epiglottitis team in the ER, which included an anesthesiologist, and ENT specialist, and a pediatrician.

Dr. Orenstein has witnessed much more than the horrors of Hib though, having worked on smallpox eradication, polio elimination, and measles control at the CDC.

He was also the Director of the United States Immunization Program between 1988 and 2004, when thimerosal was removed from most childhood vaccines, except some flu shots. More importantly, this was a time when both immunization rates greatly increased and kids got the opportunity to be protected from many more vaccine-preventable diseases than they ever had in the past.

That’s why he was featured and misquoted in Robert F. Kennedy‘s article, Deadly Immunity.

According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee’s chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was “inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation” between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result “Walt wants” — a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.

He has also been the Associate Director of the Emory Vaccine Program since 2004, except for a three year stint as Deputy Director for Immunization Programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Not surprisingly, he has received many awards for his work, including the:

  • Surgeon General’s Exemplary Service Medal
  • Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, Distinguished Service Award
  • American Academy of Pediatrics Excellence in Public Service Award
  • Stanley A. Plotkin Lecture in Vaccinology Awards
  • The Dr. Charles Mérieux Award
  • Charles C. Shepard Lifetime Scientific Achievement Award

Dr. Orenstein was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2006.

For More Information On Walter Orenstein: