Bioethics Forum Essay
The Bizarre and Dangerous Concept of Over-Vaccination
Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been obsessed for decades with reducing or eliminating childhood vaccinations. He has long seen them as very dangerous, even lethal. Recently, he has tried to stir anti-vaccination policies by claiming that children under 18 are receiving an incredible number of shots – 92 – if they comply with current federal and expert professional association recommendations.
What is utterly ridiculous about his argument is that it rests on the idea that kids in the United States are over-vaccinated. Not only does this argument rest on false claims about current practices it also relies on the idea that kids getting a lot of vaccines is inherently bad. Vaccination is inherently good – it has saved 150 million children’s lives worldwide. Vaccines prevent illness and death and therefore it is very ethical to vaccinate children.
So, what about the actual facts concerning childhood vaccinations? Do kids get as many vaccines as Kennedy claims? No.
Nearly all American children receive 30 vaccinations against 16 diseases. This excludes annual flu shots which, sadly, most children don’t get. Kids need to be getting more effective and safe vaccines, not fewer.
Nonethless, Kennedy has persuaded President Trump to let him mount a campaign to bring down the number of federally recommended shots for kids to the schedule followed by Denmark, which has the lowest number among wealthy nations –10.
In fact, Denmark is an outlier, with Germany, France, and Italy recommending 15 or more vaccines. The U.S. vaccine schedule is on a par with those of its peer economic nations.
Kennedy is using false numbers to scare Americans into thinking that American kids are over-vaccinated on a schedule the rest of the world doesn’t follow.
Numbers aside, there is something absurd about the claim that doing something 92 times over 18 years to prevent disease is bad.
Every day, I wake up and take a vitamin D pill, a fish oil supplement, a statin, and metformin. That’s 1,460 pills every year. I brush my teeth with fluoridated toothpaste three times a day, or 3,200 times a year. I exercise with weights twice a week despite the risk of injuries, meaning 104 risky events per year. So, despite very low risks, I expose myself to at least 5,000 risky interventions a year in the name of prevention. Ninety-two shots in 18 years are, aside from the brief pain of the shot, nothing. Nothing, of course, if the vaccines work.
Which brings the over-vaccination argument back full circle. It is only meaningful if one believes that vaccines don’t work or, worse, are dangerous. Which, of course, is utterly false. So, talking about overvaccination, throwing around numbers like 72 or 92 shots, is buying in to the anti-vaxx allegation that vaccines are bad for kids and more are worse.
The argument for imitating Denmark rests on a nonsensical idea. Fear-mongering about over-vaccination only makes sense if you want to seize Greenland to ensure adequate cemetery space for all the kids who will die by abandoning what has been a safe and effective vaccine schedule.
Arthur Caplan, PhD, is a Professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and a Hastings Center Fellow. The views expressed here are his own. Bluesky: artcap.bsky.social X: @arthurcaplan
