The AAP is preparing strategies to advocate for children and pediatricians with new leadership in Washington, D.C.
In advance of Senate confirmation hearings for officials who will lead agencies overseeing critical child health issues, including immunizations, the Academy solicited accounts from members who have treated children with vaccine-preventable illnesses. The stories will be shared with senators and other officials who will make decisions on Cabinet appointments, including the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
“As senators prepare to consider the next leaders of our federal health care agencies, they do so amid the proliferation of online misinformation about vaccines and increasing outbreaks of vaccine-preventable illness among children,” said AAP President Susan J. Kressly, M.D., FAAP. “Their leadership in this moment is so important, which is why I’m urging them to support science and protect our communities. Pediatricians stand ready to talk about the settled science with our elected leaders.”
In response to the Academy’s request, pediatricians shared hundreds of stories about children who suffered serious illnesses or died from vaccine-preventable diseases.
“I … have had the devastating experience of witnessing an infant turn blue repeatedly from repeated coughing bouts then die from the pertussis that wreaked her infant lungs,” a Colorado pediatrician wrote. “I have intubated babies with RSV whose secretions were drowning them. I held a mother’s hand while she sobbed as her toddler lay postictal from his umpteenth seizure from his varicella encephalitis.”
A pediatric intensive care physician from California shared how the development of the monoclonal antibody and maternal vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has revolutionized care for infants.
“These vaccines have changed the natural course of the disease and saved tens of thousands of hospitalizations and mortality,” he wrote. “Facts are hard to argue with.”
Last December, AAP leaders requested a meeting with the Trump-Vance transition team to discuss policy and explore how the Academy can be a resource for science-based information on issues affecting child health.
The AAP calls for on-time, routine immunization of all children and adolescents as the best way to spare children the suffering and death that come with diseases like polio, pertussis and measles, and to prevent the spread of contagious diseases in schools and communities. The AAP has endorsed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2025 immunizations schedules and issued a policy statement in support.
“My experience as a pediatrician approaching 36 years of practice includes time before some of the current vaccines were available,” a California pediatrician wrote. “We cannot let anything but science guide our national and state policies that affect children’s health. To do so will adversely impact their health and even be a life and death situation for them.”
A Colorado pediatrician related a story of a patient who came in with encephalitis after contracting chickenpox and never fully recovered. At the time, some parents declined the varicella vaccine and intentionally exposed their children to someone with the disease so they didn’t come down with it when they were older or when it would interfere with a major family event.
An Ohio pediatrician who finished residency in 1980 shared a memory from a two-month stint at a hospital in Ghana as a medical student.
“I still see the faces of the children with complications of measles, polio or tetanus: muscle spasms, difficulty breathing, pneumonia and dehydration,” she said. “I returned to Ohio reflecting on how fortunate we were to have access to effective vaccines against those illnesses.”
Recent data from the National Immunization Survey show immunization rates have dipped among kindergartners for several vaccines, including the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, which had a 92.7% coverage rate in the 2023-’24 school year.
Pediatricians’ role in advocating for opportunities for all communities to access immunizations is increasingly important, especially as science-based public health strategies are challenged.
Some AAP members recounted conversations with families who went from being hesitant to embracing vaccines for children, sometimes after observing a life-altering event of a loved one.
One clinician told the story of a family who repeatedly refused vaccines for their children until an unvaccinated child of a family friend died from streptococcal pneumonia sepsis while visiting in Germany.
“Immediately upon return to the United States, my patients’ mother called and asked how quickly we can get her children fully vaccinated,” the doctor wrote. “She stated she realized that the risk of death was real and that the risk of adverse developmental outcomes had not been scientifically proven and was a minor concern compared to losing her child.”
A Delaware pediatrician told a story she shares with vaccine-hesitant patients about her own son, who was born three years before the rotavirus vaccine came out in 2006. He was admitted to the hospital for severe gastroenteritis caused by rotavirus in 2004 and 2005.
“I still remember how dehydrated he had become, and it caused me and my husband a lot of stress seeing him very sick,” she wrote.
She has not admitted a single patient with gastroenteritis since the rotavirus vaccine was added to the immunization schedule, she said.
“This is amazing and tells us how vaccines are so important in preventing diseases.”