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Vaccines for Your Children
Dr. Marcy Solomon Baker leads a discussion on childhood vaccines, and how it is important to follow the recommended vaccine schedule.
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Learn more about Marcy Solomon Baker, MD
Marcy Solomon Baker, MD
Marcy Solomon Baker, MD is a dedicated and diligent pediatrician caring for the Tampa, Florida community. Dr. Baker attended the University of South Florida, where she received her medical degree. She completed her residency in pediatrics at Emory University, where she stayed a year as chief resident. Dr. Baker is a part of BayCare Medical Group and is also the Medical Director of the pediatrics offices, within BayCare Medical Group. She is board certified by the American Board of Pediatrics past president of the Hillsborough County Pediatric Society. Dr. Baker is dedicated to helping patients receive the treatment they need and watching them grow up from birth through the teenage years. She is deeply committed to the well-being of her patients.Learn more about Marcy Solomon Baker, MD
Transcription:
Vaccines for Your Children
Intro: This is BayCare HealthChat, another podcast from BayCare Health System.
Caitlin Whyte: Welcome to BayCare HealthChat. I'm Caitlin Whyte. And in this episode, we are talking about vaccines for your children, a hot topic these days. And joining us for this conversation is Dr. Marcy Solomon Baker, the Medical Director of Pediatrics at BayCare Medical Group. So, doctor, start us off today by telling us how important childhood vaccines are and how it's also important to follow the recommended vaccine schedule.
Marcy Solomon Baker, MD: So I tell people this all the time, I feel that giving vaccinations and childhood vaccines is the most important thing I do as a pediatrician. Vaccines are one of the most amazing things that we have in medicine, and they are extremely important. We are able to prevent so many diseases now that killed children in the past to be blunt and were just devastating for children and for families. And now, there are so many that we can prevent and it is extremely important.
I think with the pandemic, we've seen that some people have been nervous about going to their doctor during this time and have been a little bit scared about going in and missing some of their well-child checks. And really, it is so important to stay up on your vaccinations. They are just so important.
Caitlin Whyte: Now of course, a podcast about vaccines, we got to talk about the flu shot and the COVID vaccine, all over the news lately. What are the recommendations for those when it comes to our kids?
Marcy Solomon Baker, MD: Okay. So the recommendation for flu shot is the same as it has been for many, many years. All kids six months and older should get their annual flu vaccine. If you're under eight years old and this is the first year that you've gotten a flu vaccine, you're recommended to get two shots in that season. But after that, once you get two shots, one season after that, it's just one shot per season. So it's really strongly recommended. Kids under two are at higher risk for flu. And then kids under five are a little less at risk than the kids under two, but still higher risk than healthy adults. People with asthma or underlying medical conditions are at higher risk. But unfortunately, every year, healthy kids, sometimes rarely luckily, die from flu, and that is vaccine preventable. So it's very important to get your annual flu shot.
Now, as far as COVID vaccines. COVID vaccines have been approved for a while now. They started giving them widely in about May of 2021 for kids twelve and up. So the only vaccine that's available for kids under eighteen for COVID vaccines is the Pfizer vaccine. So unlike the adults where you can have a choice of what vaccines you want, for kids under 18, it's all the Pfizer vaccines. And then in November of 2021, the Pfizer vaccine got approved for kids from five to eleven. So it is recommended that those kids get the vaccine.
The kids from five to eleven, it's a two-dose series separated by three weeks, just like it is for the adults, but it's a third of the dose compared to the kids that are twelve and up and adults. Now, there is a recent recommendation also for kids that are twelve and up, if it's been five months since their second vaccine for COVID, that they can get a booster now. So our kids twelve and up, a lot of them who got their vaccine when it first came out are due for their boosters now. So I think that's something very important to make sure if you're due for a boost, get your booster, and for our younger kids to get vaccinated. So no booster recommendations on the younger kids yet, because they've only been eligible to get it since November. It wouldn't even be time for them to have a booster yet and we don't know if that recommendation will come down or not.
Caitlin Whyte: Well, another vaccine that's often talked about is HPV. Can you tell us about that one and why it's also important?
Marcy Solomon Baker, MD: HPV is an amazing, amazing vaccine. It is a vaccine that protects people against cancer. How amazing is that? So I always think about what you have to do for cancer prevention, okay? You have to wear sunscreen all the time, for skin cancer, right? If you're a smoker, you have to stop smoking. How hard is that? That's really hard for people to do for lung cancer. You have to eat healthy almost all the time. You have to exercise on a regular basis. Okay, all these things we know are cancer prevention, right? When you're older, you have to get a colonoscopy. How awful is that, right? Okay. But for cervical cancer and mouth and oral cancers that are caused by HPV, all you have to do is get a couple of shots, that's it and then you're protected. It's amazing. It's safe. It's effective. It's been out for, I think we're at 14 to 15 years now. It is really a wonderful vaccine.
So for kids that start the series before they turn 15, they only need two shots. If you started after you turned 15, then you need three shots, okay? The recommended time to get it is when you're 11 to 12 years old. And actually, I started giving it to my patients at age 10, because then they definitely come back in when they're 11 or 12, because they need to get their seventh-grade shots. And so I make sure everybody's complete before they hit the age of 13 and that's the goal. It has a permissive recommendation that you can start at even as young as nine. And there's really no reason not to. So it's just a wonderful vaccine and I hope everybody gets it. It's so important to protect our kids against cancer in the future.
Caitlin Whyte: Absolutely. Are there any other vaccines that I haven't pointed out that you want to kind of shine a spotlight on?
Marcy Solomon Baker, MD: Oh, well, there's a lot. So it's so important to stay, and I think we touched on this in the beginning, it's just really important to try to stay on schedule and go by the CDC recommended schedule. Some people will come in, some parents, and say, "Well, I want to delay this or delay that," or, you know, and we try to work with them. And basically, when you're making up your own schedule, that's not the studied schedule, right? You're kind of making that up. If you stay with the vaccine, the CDC recommended vaccine schedule that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends, that your pediatrician recommends, then really you're following the science and getting your kids vaccinated at the appropriate time for the appropriate diseases.
And then the other thing is, I think a lot of us are good about bringing, you know, our babies in, we're pretty good about getting our kids in when they're early teens, like that 11, 12-year-old visit because they have to have it for seventh grade. They have to have their tetanus shot to get into seventh grade. But, you know, when they're later teenagers, sometimes we don't bring them in as much, right? They have a busy schedule. So there are vaccines that age group. There's a B meningitis shot that they get at that age group. There's one they get at 11, but then they get a follow up for that at 16. And then, there's a different kind of meningitis shot that they also can get at between 16 and 18. It's important to make sure to see if they might need another tetanus booster and just getting them their flu shots. So I think one thing I'd stress is that even teenagers need to come in and make sure they're up to date on their shots.
Caitlin Whyte: Now, doctor, we both know there are so many myths surrounding vaccines. Can you debunk a few of the most popular ones that are, I guess, completely wrong?
Marcy Solomon Baker, MD: Sure. So I think, you know, initially, with the HPV vaccine, there was concern about, you know, fertility issues and things like that, that has not worn out at all in any way. And in fact, it's actually interestingly enough, the opposite. Because if you're having, you know, a lot of these pre-cancers that you can get on your cervix and that they end up when you're older having to freeze your cervix and do all this other stuff, that can actually lead to issues with carrying your baby to a full term. So if you don't have to mess with any of that stuff, because you're vaccinated, actually it increases your ability to carry a child to full term. So that's one thing with that.
I believe that also some of those rumors are the same thing now with COVID vaccine. People are worried that there's going to be fertility issues. But one thing I've told people about the COVID vaccine is that really even when vaccines have had some, you know, issues or side effects, they come up early on. It's not something that with any vaccines we've had in history that, you know, 10, 20 years later, we realize there is, you know, a problem that was caused from the vaccine.
So I like to tell people that are a little cautious about the COVID vaccine, at this point, millions and millions and millions and millions of doses have been given of this vaccine and the safety measures that are in place to surveil any problems that come from the vaccine, they're strong. We’ve already seen that where they picked up some little minor things such as like the myocarditis or blood clotting that had been extremely, extremely rare with some of the COVID vaccines in certain groups. And so I say these vaccines are very safe and luckily have been quite effective, especially in avoiding hospitalization and death.
So I just think a lot of the concern that people have, I absolutely, absolutely understand it, but now we have so much experience with these vaccines. I mean, more than any new vaccine we've ever introduced, because I don't know that we've given a new vaccine to every person almost in the world in, you know, a year's timeframe, that had been eligible for the vaccine. Unfortunately haven't given to everybody, but they've been eligible for it. So we have so many people getting this vaccine, that really, at this point, we have tons of experience with this vaccine, even though it is a newer vaccine.
For example, when we came out with the HPV vaccine, it was just for girls and it was just for girls aged 11 to 23. So, you know, if you think about now we have a vaccine that we're giving to- basically we're at the point now we're giving to everybody five and up, you know, that's a big deal. You know, we have more experience with it already. So it's almost equal to it have been out for years and years.
Caitlin Whyte: Well, doctor there's so much information. We've joked before we started recording how are we going to fit it all into 10 minutes? But as we wrap up here, can you just remind us one more time about the harms of not getting vaccinated out of all of these vaccines?
Marcy Solomon Baker, MD: As I mentioned earlier and I hate to do this, but this is the truth. People die from vaccine preventable diseases and it's just awful. Obviously, the worst thing is death, but then there's other things. In some of the [different types of] meningitis, you can lose a limb, okay? You can lose your hearing. You can get neurologically devastated and, you know, be not able to care for yourself. So there are just very serious, serious things that can happen with these diseases if we don't get vaccinated against them.
Let's even look at it on a smaller scale. Those things, thank goodness, are rare, right? But I tell high school kids when they're kind of pushing back on getting their flu vaccine, I'm like, "Do you want to get the flu and be out of school for a week?" I had one that said yes, but it was just... but just the idea of, you know, and even if you end up being hospitalized and you ended up being okay in the end, it's not very good to be in the hospital, right? It’s uncomfortable, it's expensive, it's not good for your family, it can be traumatizing for the child. So it's just so important to avoid hospitalizations, to avoid death, to avoid some of the very serious, you know, morbidities that can come from these diseases.
Caitlin Whyte: Well, just some critical information at this time of year and really in general for anyone with children. Thank you for taking the time to be with us, Dr. Baker. I love to hear your passion.
Head on over to our website, BayCareKids.org, for more vaccine information. And please remember to subscribe, rate and review this podcast and all of the other BayCare podcasts. For more health tips and updates, follow us on your social channels. This has been another episode of BayCare HealthChat. I'm Caitlin Whyte. Stay well.
Vaccines for Your Children
Intro: This is BayCare HealthChat, another podcast from BayCare Health System.
Caitlin Whyte: Welcome to BayCare HealthChat. I'm Caitlin Whyte. And in this episode, we are talking about vaccines for your children, a hot topic these days. And joining us for this conversation is Dr. Marcy Solomon Baker, the Medical Director of Pediatrics at BayCare Medical Group. So, doctor, start us off today by telling us how important childhood vaccines are and how it's also important to follow the recommended vaccine schedule.
Marcy Solomon Baker, MD: So I tell people this all the time, I feel that giving vaccinations and childhood vaccines is the most important thing I do as a pediatrician. Vaccines are one of the most amazing things that we have in medicine, and they are extremely important. We are able to prevent so many diseases now that killed children in the past to be blunt and were just devastating for children and for families. And now, there are so many that we can prevent and it is extremely important.
I think with the pandemic, we've seen that some people have been nervous about going to their doctor during this time and have been a little bit scared about going in and missing some of their well-child checks. And really, it is so important to stay up on your vaccinations. They are just so important.
Caitlin Whyte: Now of course, a podcast about vaccines, we got to talk about the flu shot and the COVID vaccine, all over the news lately. What are the recommendations for those when it comes to our kids?
Marcy Solomon Baker, MD: Okay. So the recommendation for flu shot is the same as it has been for many, many years. All kids six months and older should get their annual flu vaccine. If you're under eight years old and this is the first year that you've gotten a flu vaccine, you're recommended to get two shots in that season. But after that, once you get two shots, one season after that, it's just one shot per season. So it's really strongly recommended. Kids under two are at higher risk for flu. And then kids under five are a little less at risk than the kids under two, but still higher risk than healthy adults. People with asthma or underlying medical conditions are at higher risk. But unfortunately, every year, healthy kids, sometimes rarely luckily, die from flu, and that is vaccine preventable. So it's very important to get your annual flu shot.
Now, as far as COVID vaccines. COVID vaccines have been approved for a while now. They started giving them widely in about May of 2021 for kids twelve and up. So the only vaccine that's available for kids under eighteen for COVID vaccines is the Pfizer vaccine. So unlike the adults where you can have a choice of what vaccines you want, for kids under 18, it's all the Pfizer vaccines. And then in November of 2021, the Pfizer vaccine got approved for kids from five to eleven. So it is recommended that those kids get the vaccine.
The kids from five to eleven, it's a two-dose series separated by three weeks, just like it is for the adults, but it's a third of the dose compared to the kids that are twelve and up and adults. Now, there is a recent recommendation also for kids that are twelve and up, if it's been five months since their second vaccine for COVID, that they can get a booster now. So our kids twelve and up, a lot of them who got their vaccine when it first came out are due for their boosters now. So I think that's something very important to make sure if you're due for a boost, get your booster, and for our younger kids to get vaccinated. So no booster recommendations on the younger kids yet, because they've only been eligible to get it since November. It wouldn't even be time for them to have a booster yet and we don't know if that recommendation will come down or not.
Caitlin Whyte: Well, another vaccine that's often talked about is HPV. Can you tell us about that one and why it's also important?
Marcy Solomon Baker, MD: HPV is an amazing, amazing vaccine. It is a vaccine that protects people against cancer. How amazing is that? So I always think about what you have to do for cancer prevention, okay? You have to wear sunscreen all the time, for skin cancer, right? If you're a smoker, you have to stop smoking. How hard is that? That's really hard for people to do for lung cancer. You have to eat healthy almost all the time. You have to exercise on a regular basis. Okay, all these things we know are cancer prevention, right? When you're older, you have to get a colonoscopy. How awful is that, right? Okay. But for cervical cancer and mouth and oral cancers that are caused by HPV, all you have to do is get a couple of shots, that's it and then you're protected. It's amazing. It's safe. It's effective. It's been out for, I think we're at 14 to 15 years now. It is really a wonderful vaccine.
So for kids that start the series before they turn 15, they only need two shots. If you started after you turned 15, then you need three shots, okay? The recommended time to get it is when you're 11 to 12 years old. And actually, I started giving it to my patients at age 10, because then they definitely come back in when they're 11 or 12, because they need to get their seventh-grade shots. And so I make sure everybody's complete before they hit the age of 13 and that's the goal. It has a permissive recommendation that you can start at even as young as nine. And there's really no reason not to. So it's just a wonderful vaccine and I hope everybody gets it. It's so important to protect our kids against cancer in the future.
Caitlin Whyte: Absolutely. Are there any other vaccines that I haven't pointed out that you want to kind of shine a spotlight on?
Marcy Solomon Baker, MD: Oh, well, there's a lot. So it's so important to stay, and I think we touched on this in the beginning, it's just really important to try to stay on schedule and go by the CDC recommended schedule. Some people will come in, some parents, and say, "Well, I want to delay this or delay that," or, you know, and we try to work with them. And basically, when you're making up your own schedule, that's not the studied schedule, right? You're kind of making that up. If you stay with the vaccine, the CDC recommended vaccine schedule that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends, that your pediatrician recommends, then really you're following the science and getting your kids vaccinated at the appropriate time for the appropriate diseases.
And then the other thing is, I think a lot of us are good about bringing, you know, our babies in, we're pretty good about getting our kids in when they're early teens, like that 11, 12-year-old visit because they have to have it for seventh grade. They have to have their tetanus shot to get into seventh grade. But, you know, when they're later teenagers, sometimes we don't bring them in as much, right? They have a busy schedule. So there are vaccines that age group. There's a B meningitis shot that they get at that age group. There's one they get at 11, but then they get a follow up for that at 16. And then, there's a different kind of meningitis shot that they also can get at between 16 and 18. It's important to make sure to see if they might need another tetanus booster and just getting them their flu shots. So I think one thing I'd stress is that even teenagers need to come in and make sure they're up to date on their shots.
Caitlin Whyte: Now, doctor, we both know there are so many myths surrounding vaccines. Can you debunk a few of the most popular ones that are, I guess, completely wrong?
Marcy Solomon Baker, MD: Sure. So I think, you know, initially, with the HPV vaccine, there was concern about, you know, fertility issues and things like that, that has not worn out at all in any way. And in fact, it's actually interestingly enough, the opposite. Because if you're having, you know, a lot of these pre-cancers that you can get on your cervix and that they end up when you're older having to freeze your cervix and do all this other stuff, that can actually lead to issues with carrying your baby to a full term. So if you don't have to mess with any of that stuff, because you're vaccinated, actually it increases your ability to carry a child to full term. So that's one thing with that.
I believe that also some of those rumors are the same thing now with COVID vaccine. People are worried that there's going to be fertility issues. But one thing I've told people about the COVID vaccine is that really even when vaccines have had some, you know, issues or side effects, they come up early on. It's not something that with any vaccines we've had in history that, you know, 10, 20 years later, we realize there is, you know, a problem that was caused from the vaccine.
So I like to tell people that are a little cautious about the COVID vaccine, at this point, millions and millions and millions and millions of doses have been given of this vaccine and the safety measures that are in place to surveil any problems that come from the vaccine, they're strong. We’ve already seen that where they picked up some little minor things such as like the myocarditis or blood clotting that had been extremely, extremely rare with some of the COVID vaccines in certain groups. And so I say these vaccines are very safe and luckily have been quite effective, especially in avoiding hospitalization and death.
So I just think a lot of the concern that people have, I absolutely, absolutely understand it, but now we have so much experience with these vaccines. I mean, more than any new vaccine we've ever introduced, because I don't know that we've given a new vaccine to every person almost in the world in, you know, a year's timeframe, that had been eligible for the vaccine. Unfortunately haven't given to everybody, but they've been eligible for it. So we have so many people getting this vaccine, that really, at this point, we have tons of experience with this vaccine, even though it is a newer vaccine.
For example, when we came out with the HPV vaccine, it was just for girls and it was just for girls aged 11 to 23. So, you know, if you think about now we have a vaccine that we're giving to- basically we're at the point now we're giving to everybody five and up, you know, that's a big deal. You know, we have more experience with it already. So it's almost equal to it have been out for years and years.
Caitlin Whyte: Well, doctor there's so much information. We've joked before we started recording how are we going to fit it all into 10 minutes? But as we wrap up here, can you just remind us one more time about the harms of not getting vaccinated out of all of these vaccines?
Marcy Solomon Baker, MD: As I mentioned earlier and I hate to do this, but this is the truth. People die from vaccine preventable diseases and it's just awful. Obviously, the worst thing is death, but then there's other things. In some of the [different types of] meningitis, you can lose a limb, okay? You can lose your hearing. You can get neurologically devastated and, you know, be not able to care for yourself. So there are just very serious, serious things that can happen with these diseases if we don't get vaccinated against them.
Let's even look at it on a smaller scale. Those things, thank goodness, are rare, right? But I tell high school kids when they're kind of pushing back on getting their flu vaccine, I'm like, "Do you want to get the flu and be out of school for a week?" I had one that said yes, but it was just... but just the idea of, you know, and even if you end up being hospitalized and you ended up being okay in the end, it's not very good to be in the hospital, right? It’s uncomfortable, it's expensive, it's not good for your family, it can be traumatizing for the child. So it's just so important to avoid hospitalizations, to avoid death, to avoid some of the very serious, you know, morbidities that can come from these diseases.
Caitlin Whyte: Well, just some critical information at this time of year and really in general for anyone with children. Thank you for taking the time to be with us, Dr. Baker. I love to hear your passion.
Head on over to our website, BayCareKids.org, for more vaccine information. And please remember to subscribe, rate and review this podcast and all of the other BayCare podcasts. For more health tips and updates, follow us on your social channels. This has been another episode of BayCare HealthChat. I'm Caitlin Whyte. Stay well.