To Vaccinate or Not to Vaccinate?

For the vast majority of parents, vaccinating their children is a given. But for some parents, vaccines represent a threat to their child's health and safety. And that threat becomes real for an even smaller number -- the parents of the one child in approximately one million who does have a severe reaction to a vaccine.

Those parents have largely made their voices heard, but with vaccine scare stories flooding the Internet, parents who support vaccines have started to speak up, too. Karen Ernst, a mother of three in St. Paul, Minnesota, started a parent-led advocacy organization called "Voices for Vaccines."

"We were frustrated by people opting out [of vaccines] for no real reason," Ernst says. Her group targets parents who are in "that vacuum of parents not thinking about vaccines or stumbling upon something on social media with no context to put that in."

A new documentary called "Calling the Shots," which airs on PBS tonight around 9:20 p.m. EST, also targets parents in the no man's land of misinformation about vaccines as well as those with questions and concerns about them.

[Read: Vaccine Safety: Getting the Message to Parents in Doubt.]

Re-emergence of Once-Eradicated Diseases

"Seventy years ago, we didn't have to sell vaccines to people because those diseases were a real threat," Brian Zikmund-Fisher, an associate professor of health behavior and health education at the University of Michigan, said at a press briefing in the District of Columbia last week. Those diseases include polio, diphtheria, pertussis (or whooping cough), meningitis and measles.

"Vaccines have made these diseases rare," Zikmund-Fisher added. But some -- namely whooping cough and measles -- have re-emerged as people stopped vaccinating against them.

The number of measles cases this year in the U.S. -- 600, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- is the highest in two decades, and in 2012, there were 50,000 cases of whooping cough, with 20 deaths.

"It's not going to take much more before we see these diseases everywhere," Zikmund-Fisher said.

The documentary was created in part to prevent this turning-back-the-clock on preventable disease outbreaks. Using interviews with parents who do have concerns about vaccines, however, it goes to the heart of mainstream questions and concerns about vaccines. In light of that, U.S. News asked experts for questions that parents might ask their child's pediatrician about vaccines.

[Read: Keeping Your Kids Healthy at Summer Camp.]

Asking the Doctor About Vaccines

-- What diseases are we vaccinating against? "What we are vaccinating for often gets lost," Zikmund-Fisher says. "I really do believe that a lot of parents will be relieved if that question got asked more often. There's a lot in the schedule, and it does vary state to state. 'What are the diseases these are trying to prevent?' is the right question no matter where you are." The CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics both have updated requirements on their websites, divvied up by age.

-- Why are there so many more vaccines today than when I was growing up? "That's one of the great things about vaccine technology: We are able to prevent more serious illnesses," says Tanya Altmann, a pediatrician in Los Angeles and a spokeswoman for the AAP. The individual vaccines also contain fewer proteins, so they have less potential for causing side effects, Altmann says. "The DTaP [diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis] vaccine had [around] 3,000 proteins. Now it has three. It's less of a load on the immune system." Because of this, Altmann recommends lumping shots together. "I personally would rather give a few at once just so [children] don't have to go through the discomfort again," she says. "You never know when you're going to be exposed to an infectious disease at a mall or a park."

-- What is behind the vaccine schedule? "The vaccine schedule is designed to try to balance a number of important priorities," Zikmund-Fisher says. "It's trying to give kids vaccines [for the diseases] that are most likely to be dangerous early on. There's a reason why we give the pertussis vaccine at seven or eight weeks." And spreading out shots over a certain period -- like the DTaP for babies 15 months and younger -- is designed to allow the immune system to fully react between shots. Altmann adds that it's important to follow the official vaccine schedule, according to the CDC, AAP and state health departments. "The vaccine schedule was made after years and years of research and trying to find out the ideal schedule for each dose. I rely on the research that's been done by all those excellent scientists."

-- Are vaccines safe? This is the No. 1 question on parents' minds. "Vaccines are not perfect, but they are one of the safest things in medicine," Zikmund-Fisher says. Vaccines are truly unsafe and not recommended for approximately 500,000 people in the U.S., out of 300 million. People who are taking chemotherapy or immunosuppressant drugs should not get vaccinated. And one in one million children will have a severe reaction to the vaccine. The vaccine may cause a bad fever, which in turn can lead to seizures. But the risk of this happening to your child is lower than the risk of your child getting hit by a bicycle or hurt in a car accident driving to the doctor's office, Zikmund-Fisher says.

-- What are the risks of not vaccinating my child (or myself)? "This is the heart of the challenge that we face," Zikmund-Fisher says. There is little collective memory left of what it was like to actually have these diseases or know people with them, so on one hand, parents have more luxury to not think about the real threat they pose, he adds. On the other hand, we are dealing with a new risk of disease contraction -- which our ancestors never had to deal with -- because we are such a mobile society. "A person from across the globe could bring these diseases behind you, right in Starbucks," Zikmund-Fisher adds. If someone with measles is sitting in a pediatric waiting room, "all the newborns in the waiting room get it," Altmann adds, because the measles vaccine is usually given at age 1. "We have a responsibility to protect the most vulnerable among us," Zikmund-Fisher adds. "Whooping cough for a 20-year-old is not that same thing as whooping cough for a pregnant woman or an infant."

If parents find worrisome information about vaccines on the Internet, they should print it out and share it with their doctor, Ernst says. She once found information that advised delaying the chickenpox vaccine, so she printed it out and shared it with her pediatrician. "He said, 'Get [the vaccine] now.' I'm glad I didn't wait because the science got settled on that," Ernst says. "Don't assume that a doctor will have the same thing that you read."

"The other thing I tell parents is, 'If you're really scared, call [your pediatrician] and ask for an extra-long appointment,'" Ernst continues. And finally, she adds, find some way to positively advertise that your child is vaccinated. "When [vaccinating] becomes the normal thing to do, it feels safer," she says. "Post a picture on Facebook, 'Here's my kid eating ice cream after getting vaccinated.'"

[Read: Has Your Child Outgrown the Pediatrician?]

Kristine Crane is a Patient Advice reporter at U.S. News. You can follow her on Twitter, connect with her on LinkedIn or email her at kcrane@usnews.com.