Your baby’s first set of routine immunizations starts at 2 months of age. Then again at 4 and 6 months. There is another visit at 9 months, then 12 months, then at 15-to-18 months. It is very important to have you baby fully immunized before its second birthday.
Always keep your baby’s yellow shot card record in a safe place, as your child will need that all the way up to college! Bring it with you for every checkup, and if you are on the WIC program, bring all your WIC paperwork with you too.
Dr. Matney feels very strongly about making sure all babies and children are fully and correctly immunized. He believes in following all of the scientific guidelines published by the Academy of Pediatrics, and the Centers for Disease Control, and the California Department of Health Care Services. All of these vaccine recommendations are based on hundreds of published studies about their safety and efficacy and only the published schedules have been studied scientifically to work for your baby.
Nothing in medicine gets more study and scrutiny and more safety oversight than baby vaccines, and the government swoops in every single time there is even a minor technical concern to stop production until any issue gets addressed. All vaccines are labeled with a number and these are constantly tracked for safety. Vaccine shipping and storage and administration are computer tracked at all times.
So many well-intentioned parents have been frightened and misled by supposed “experts” to think that it is OK to mess around with shots and with shot schedules, but none of these self-promoters have ever published a single scientific study to back up their claims. Like most quackery, it has to “sound good” but no one can promise you that those “alternate schedules” are safe and effective to actually prevent the disease. So it is just not worth the risk to your baby’s health to follow “internet experts” or media personalities with their own questionable agendas.
It is now scientifically clear that vaccines do NOT cause autism, which is a very complicated and multifactorial condition with only some of its causes and genetic risk factors worked out so far. But what HAS been studied over and over again is that autism is NOT caused by vaccines. But since the internet is forever, these same baseless fears keep getting recycled and used to exploit unsuspecting parents. So much fear and even unnecessary death can be blamed on this fear-mongering.
The facts are that vaccinations are actually safer than they have ever been before in history, and that they can protect your baby and child from more serious illnesses than ever before. But thanks to modern-day invasions from third-world diseases and to anti-vaxxers, many of these potentially fatal diseases have made a shocking comeback.
Sadly, during his long career, Dr. Matney has personally cared for babies and children that have unnecessarily died from measles, whooping cough (pertussis), spinal meningitis, and from influenza (the flu), and he has also cared for children with serious brain injuries, and lung and skin infections from chickenpox. He therefore believes so strongly in all these life-saving vaccines, that his office policy is that non-vaccinating parents are politely advised to go elsewhere. He does not want to risk your baby’s health with the possibility of a waiting-room exposure to these deadly diseases over these misguided ideas, and he does not provide “personal belief” exemptions for school admission purposes. We wish everyone well, and ultimately we still have to respect whatever decision they might end up making, even when we strongly disapprove of it, but we can’t support the risk to others in our office or in the public schools.
