Last updated: June 8, 2013
In 2012, we heard testimony from Dr. Chen (Commissioner of Health and former ER doc). One shocking thing he told the Senate Committee on Health is that if a child presents in the ER with a very high fever, he may not do a full workup on the child if the child was vaccinated, because since vaccines he knows that child is “protected.”
Recently, Voices for Vaccines* also posted a blog article that proposes something similar to what Doctor Chen had explained: that vaccinated and unvaccinated children receive a different workup in the ER. They even alluded to the fact that unvaccinated children might cost more!
*This is a so-called advocacy group that claims they receive no funding from pharma, but which is organized under the umbrella of the Task Force for Global Health (which does) and has doctors who are very much aligned with the pharmaceutical industry on it’s advisory board.
If your child is fully vaccinated, let us hope that the vaccines work as promoted. Because in the ER, some doctors may assume that the vaccines work all the time. The fact is, they don’t. Assuming a child with a high fever is truly sick enough to require emergency medical care, as a parent you should insist on full a proper workup regardless of whether your child is vaccinated.
What Voice for Vaccines (and others) seem to be proposing is that a full workup will not be done on a vaccinated child. But, what about the rare but real potential for vaccine failure?
Will your vaccinated but very sick child be sent home or perhaps misdiagnosed?
Did you know that HIB vaccine failure is well documented (see: http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/12/1700.full, http://www.hindawi.com/crim/id/2012/950107/)?
Did you know that is the ER docs are not testing for HIB they may also miss strains that are being selected for through use of the vaccine (see http://jcm.asm.org/content/42/2/524.full) and may erroneously send your very sick child home?
June 5, 2013: Alaska suffering with invasive illness due to serotype replacement following use of the Hib vaccine.
“When a vaccine came out with very good uptake, especially across rural Alaska, HiB numbers went way down. But corresponding to that, we’ve had in increase in invasive cases of another sero group, haemophilus influenzae A. We’ve actually had an increase, which you can’t see in the report, but the B numbers are much lower than they were years ago, while the A numbers have crept up,” said Cooper.”