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Babies and children who lack paper vaccination records sometimes receive two or three times the number of vaccines recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to experts who spoke with The Defender. Children whose parents immigrated to the U.S. and who don’t speak English are at the greatest risk.
Many medical providers assume that if there’s no record of a vaccination, the best way to ensure that a child receives the recommended vaccine is to readminister it, according to Rena Maculans, a registered nurse in California. “That’s the mentality of the providers,” she said.
Maculans — who spent 10 years as an emergency department (ER) nurse and later processed autism treatment claims — said urgent care and ER staff typically follow protocols that tell them to vaccinate a child if there’s no documentation of a prior vaccination.
Maculans said she followed those protocols before she realized that vaccines can cause harm. “We were all under the impression, well, if you double up on it, it’s a good thing. You have extra protection.”
Now, Maculans, whose daughter was injured by a COVID-19 vaccine, urges people to carry their immunization record with them. “That’s why I tell people, anytime you go to the doctor or urgent care, bring your immunization records with you.”
Maculans said she began piecing things together while processing medical claims for Partnership HealthPlan of California, a healthcare provider that serves over 900,000 Medi-Cal members in Northern California.
Medi-Cal is the state’s Medicaid program that provides free or low-cost health coverage for low-income individuals and families.
Maculans was a “utilization management nurse coordinator,” which meant she processed medical claims for continuation of services, including autism treatment services. It was her job to determine whether a patient should continue receiving autism treatments, including speech therapy visits, or whether the patient no longer needed the treatments.
She noticed that a highly disproportionate number of the claims were submitted by families that spoke only Spanish. In other words, more Spanish-speaking children reported having continued or increased autism symptoms that required treatment, compared to English-speaking or bilingual kids.
Knowing the link between certain vaccine ingredients and increased autism risk, she suspected that Spanish-speaking Medi-Cal families — such as migrant workers — may experience increased vaccinations due to language barriers and not having their children’s immunization records on hand to prove prior vaccination to medical staff.
California has among the highest autism rates in the country — 1 in 12.5 boys, according to the latest available CDC data.
Maculans acknowledged that she is speculating and that, under HIPAA laws that protect patients’ private health records, she could not take screenshots of the claims that she said would reveal the trends she observed.
Dr. Paul Thomas, a retired pediatrician and co-author of the book, “Vax Facts: What to Consider Before Vaccinating at All Ages & All Stages of Life,” said he recalled during his pediatric residency training in California, that “the migrant farmworkers’ children were often subjected to vaccines because there were no records of prior vaccines.”
Sometimes medical offices claim they don’t have a child’s medical records and that the child should redo the vaccinations. A mother said on “The People’s Study” that her son’s pediatrician’s office “misplaced” her son’s proof of vaccination when the office transitioned from physical to computerized medical records.
The office staff advised her that the child should receive the MMR (measles- mumps-rubella) vaccine again, which he did. He immediately developed a fever, took Tylenol, and was later diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a term previously used to describe a neurodevelopmental disorder on the autism spectrum.
California, like most states, requires pediatricians who treat Medicaid patients to be enrolled in the CDC’s Vaccines for Children Program. The program, in turn, requires doctors to follow the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule strictly.
A recent investigation by The Defender found that one of the largest Medicaid health plans in the U.S., California’s Inland Empire Health Plan, pays low-income parents hundreds of dollars in gift cards to vaccinate their children.
‘Catching-up’ babies and kids on vaccines is common — and dangerous
Maculans also noticed when reviewing claims that mothers tended to report that their child had increased autism symptoms, or further regression, after a wellness visit with the pediatrician.
She suspected that some of the children who lacked a paper trail were given repeated doses of vaccines to ensure that they were up-to-date on their vaccinations.
Thomas said it’s “very common” for pediatricians to attempt to “catch-up” babies and children on vaccines who appear not to have received the shots in the past. “This is routinely done at all well visits.”
Dr. Elizabeth Mumper, a pediatrician, said she’s opposed to giving multiple vaccines at once to babies and kids who lack paperwork.
“If a child does not have paperwork, we should not assume they are not adequately immunized,” she said. “Accumulating evidence shows that a subset of children is more likely on a genetic basis to have difficulty tolerating the mitochondrial stress that multiple vaccines given at once can cause.”
Health risks from giving too many shots at once are real. Last March, a 1-year-old named Sa’Niya died roughly 12 hours after receiving six shots for 12 vaccines during a wellness visit. The nurse who administered the shots said Sa’Niya needed them to catch her up on vaccinations she missed at her 6-month appointment.
Most babies receive up to nine vaccines at their 1-year wellness visit if the provider is following the CDC’s Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule.
The CDC schedule recommends 12-month-olds receive: a third dose of the hepatitis B vaccine, a third or fourth dose of the Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) vaccine, a fourth dose of the pneumococcal vaccine, the third dose of the polio vaccine, one or two doses of the influenza vaccine, one dose of the MMR vaccine, one dose of the varicella vaccine, and one dose of the hepatitis A vaccine.
Doctors may also choose to give a dose of the RSV vaccine.
The CDC also publishes a catch-up schedule of up to 10 vaccines for babies and children ages 4 months through 6 years, and up to nine vaccines for kids and teens ages 7 to 18, depending on which earlier vaccinations they missed.
Some of the recommended vaccines contain antigens for more than one disease. For instance, the DTaP targets diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis; and the MMR is for measles, mumps and rubella.
Neil Z. Miller, a medical researcher who authored a book on vaccines, said giving kids multiple vaccines to catch them up — either because they lack paperwork or never received the vaccines — is dangerous. He said:
“In my 40 years of studying vaccines and talking with parents, many whose children received up to 13 vaccines concurrently via the catch-up program, all of them regretted that decision, and many are still caring for their immunologically and/or neurologically damaged children.”
Kids immigrating to U.S. particularly at risk
Children entering the U.S. from foreign countries are particularly at risk of getting duplicate vaccinations. That’s because federal immigration law requires them to receive numerous vaccines if they can’t provide written proof they were vaccinated in their country of origin.
Mumper said she has “personally evaluated more than a dozen immigrant children without vaccine records who received multiple vaccines at once and suffered behavioral and medical regressions.”
Immigrants coming from refugee camps often lack documentation of their vaccinations, said Christina Xenides, an immigration lawyer with Siri & Glimstad who helps people get waivers from U.S. immigration vaccine requirements.
She recently worked on behalf of two little girls from a refugee camp in Thailand, who were adopted by a U.S. couple. “There were no records of anything,” Xenides said.
In some cases, even those immigrants who do show documentation may still be told they need to redo shots. Xenides explained:
“There are occasions where people have records and they bring them to the doctor for their immigration medical exam, and maybe for one reason or another, they’re not accepted. Maybe it doesn’t look official enough, or maybe they can’t make out the dates, or something is wrong with the record.”
According to the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Consular Affairs, immigrants are required to be vaccinated for over a dozen illnesses, including hepatitis A and B, influenza, Hib, measles, meningococcal, mumps, pneumococcal, pertussis, polio, rubella, tetanus and diphtheria toxoids, and varicella, commonly known as chickenpox.
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A couple interviewed during Children’s Health Defense’s Vaxxed tour said that when they emigrated to the U.S., their child was given double doses of the MMR vaccine. They said the child was sicker than their other child, who didn’t get extra doses of MMR.
Xenides said she found it interesting that medical examiners accept an oral account of chickenpox as proof that the person had the illness — something they don’t do with other diseases.
A person can go into the immigration medical exam and tell the examiner that their mom said they had the chickenpox at age 2, and the examiner will mark off the chickenpox vaccination as complete, Xenides said.
“They must not be too worried about that one because it’s like, why not just accept an oral account for the other ones then?” she added.
Mandating vaccines without flexible documentation policies “disproportionately harms displaced and immigrant children,” said Dr. Michelle Perro, a pediatrician in California.
Duplicate vaccinations could be prevented if providers accepted more oral accounts or did antibody testing to check immunity, Perro said. “We must align public health with compassion using testing and clinical judgment rather than blanket revaccination.”
Related articles in The Defender- Exclusive: California Medicaid Provider Pays Parents Hundreds of Dollars to Vaccinate Their Kids
- Baby Dies After Receiving 6 Shots for 12 Vaccines — Doctors Say ‘Catching Up’ Kids on Vaccines Is Common, and Dangerous
- ‘We Get Paid to Vaccinate Your Children’: Pediatrician Reveals Details of Big Pharma Payola Scheme
- Pediatrician Slams $11.9 Billion Plan to Vaccinate 500 Million Children by 2030
