Shots in the dark: who should decide which vaccinations children receive?

• Author: Blevins, Sue A.

Lyla Rose Belkin was an alert and lively baby at five weeks old. Her parents, Michael and Lorna Belkin, say she had never been sick until she received a mandatory hepatitis B shot on September 16, 1998. "That night she became agitated and feisty," her father recalls. "Then she fell asleep and never woke up." Doctors told the Belkins that Lyla must have died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, a catchall diagnosis.

For weeks, Michael and Lorna agonized over what could have caused their daughter's death. They wondered if the hepatitis B vaccination might have had something to do with it. Most doctors scoffed at their question and assured them the vaccine was safe. That's when they began investigating their baby's risk of contracting hepatitis B.

After much research, Michael Belkin says: "It's ridiculous to give this vaccine to a newborn. How is a baby possibly going to get hepatitis B?" Unlike diseases that are transmitted via air and casual contact, hepatitis B is transmitted by direct contact with blood and other body fluids. Those at risk include intravenous drug users, sexually active individuals, blood transfusion recipients, health care workers, and babies born to infected mothers.

Why, then, are government officials making hepatitis B vaccination mandatory for attending day care? Why have 42 states added the vaccine to their lists of immunizations required for attending school?

Since public health officials have failed to reach the high-risk populations, they are making hepatitis B vaccination compulsory for all children, even infants who clearly are not at risk. What better time to force medical care on people than during their first weeks of life, when they are too young to refuse the shots or to complain about side effects? The director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Immunization Program has publicly acknowledged that "infants are considered the easiest to immunize."

But what makes sense to the CDC doesn't necessarily make sense to a parent. Michael Belkin, who studied statistics and econometrics at the University of California at Berkeley and consults for some of the largest financial institutions on Wall Street, understands risk-benefit analysis. "Vaccination can be a lifesaver if an epidemic is raging," he says, "but in this case the risk of vaccination outweighs the risk of infants getting the disease. I believe the mandatory policy for hepatitis B vaccination should be completely revoked."

He's not...