The Rise of the Zero-Dose Child

Raise your hand if you're the parent of a zero-dose baby

This onesie doesn’t exist, I made it in 30 seconds on Custom Ink. But if you think I should get into the cheeky quackxine t-shirt design business, drop me a note.

Today’s Google News delivered an NPR story about “global buzz words for 2023” and I have to say, I’m loving this one. Presenting: The zero-dose child. “Those who had never received any of even the most essential vaccinations —diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus.”

Essential, do you hear them? Like oxygen, like mother’s milk, like skin-to-skin snuggles. The tetanus toxoid jab for your newborn is just like that.

I, for one, am embracing the “zero-dose” term.

The history of “zero-dose” traces back to the confusing misnomer for the first birth dose of oral polio vaccine. I have no idea why they’d call it “zero-dose” and not “one-dose” and I don’t care to figure it out. But in the last seven years or so, public health transitioned to using “zero-dose” to mean completely, across-the-board, vaccine-free and I somehow managed to never hear of it.

Despite the progress of immunization in the last two decades — 78% of children received routine vaccines in 2020 compared to 59% in 2000 — a growing number of children are missing out completely. "Zero-dose" children are those who had never received any of even the most essential vaccinations —diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus. Before the pandemic, they numbered an estimated 13 million. It's now believed there could be as many as 18 million.

"We lost 30 years of progress in 3 years," says Lily Caprani, head of Global Advocacy for Health and Vaccines at UNICEF. The decline has been blamed on an uptick in conflict, a spread of misinformation and pandemic-related supply chain disruptions.

Obviously, UNICEF is referring to a global number, not a US one, and specifically it’s Africa’s business they’re always up in. So they blame war, anti-vax “misinformation,” and supply chain problems for the downturn in global infant vaccination, but they don’t blame terrifying people into not leaving their houses, lockdowns, doctor refusal to see patients, or seeing COVID-vaccinated athletes clutching their chests on soccer fields.

Was there a similar uptake downturn in the states in the last two years? It’s hard to say. NPR wants us to think there was. But aside from the lockdown weeks of mid-March through late-May, American pediatricians spent two years begging parents to keep up with vaccine appointments for their infants and toddlers. The impact of COVID mania remains to be seen because that data comes out on a significant delay.

The National Immunization Survey

I wrote about the “Vaxxed effect” years ago, on the topic of the potential impact the summer 2016 MMR film had on newborn vaccination rates. According to the National Immunization Survey, compliance for the full combined series (that’s all the essential primary vaccines plus the gratuitous ones) fell from 77% for white toddlers in 2016 to 72% in 2017, and from 68% for black toddlers to 64%. And the percentage of toddlers who received no vaccines (holla, zero dose babies!) rocketed from 0.8% of all children under 36 months to 1.1%, as shown in the bottom row of the chart below.

That’s a 37.5% increase in zero-dose three-year-olds from 2016 to 2017. To put that into a rough estimate you can make sense of, in the US, there were 3.93 million babies born in 2013 and 3.99 million born in 2014. 31,440 of them remained vaccine-free through toddlerhood to the end of 2016. That shot up to 43,890 by the end of 2017.

You can see the 2016 rates here, published in November of 2017, and the 2017 rates here, published in October of 2018. After that, the 19-35 months report comes to an end.

I dug into the MMWR ChildVaxView and discovered that, indeed, 2018 was the last year of the 19-35 months report, which would have been 2017 data, because what does the CDC do if not make it impossible to compare apples to apples for years on end?

For the year 2019 they decided to instead publish “Vaccination Coverage by Age 24 Months Among Children Born in 2015 and 2016.” Let’s click the table and see what the unvaccinated rate is. They’ve broken the data down to babies born 2013-2014 in the left column, and 2015-2016 in the right column.

Ruh-roh! 1.3% of 3.96 million births in 2015-2016 means 51,474 zero-dose babies. Looks like the CDC might be in trouble.

On top of that, for whatever reason, when the CDC puts out later reports, the numbers have changed slightly. For instance, the October 2021 report on 24-month old children born 2017-2018 (right column), also references back to the children born in 2015-2016 (left column).

You see that? They’ve bumped the 2015-2016 zero-dose babies to 1.4% two years after their initial report. That’s 55,433 zero-dose babies born in 2015-2016. I think, perhaps, that’s the effect Vaxxed had on the population at the time.

The CDC’s most recent report, which is a bit late because it’s 2021 data but was just published five days ago, covers two-year-olds born in 2018-2019. CDC claims their work in demonizing antivaxxers drove the full series compliance up to 80% and they’ve beat back the zero-dose babies to 0.9% but who knows… do we need to wait a few years and see if their numbers change?

But maybe the CDC was successful. 2019 was the beginning of the nonstop onslaught of silencing the movement. Adam Schiff got Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to take steps to censor us. The WHO made 2019 headlines when it declared “vaccine hesitancy” to be a top 10 threat to global health. It was the year that the looney tunes Lindenberger family was swooped up by GlaxoSmithKline and shoved down our throats for months on end. Maybe people were shamed into compliance.

And keep in mind, this isn’t the “babies born in 2020-2021” data we’re all jonesing to read. We won’t see the 2020 baby data until the 2023 report at the end of this year (or beginning of next year, if they’re late again) and the 2021 baby data won’t come out until late 2024.

Sure, we’ve all seen people on social media saying they’ll never take another vaccine of any kind after they were swindled by Pfizer and Moderna, but what percentage of the population are they? And, if they aren’t having future children, do the opinions of the COVID-regret population even matter?

What do you think the impact of exposing COVID vaccine pseudoscience will be?

Anyway. Rock on with your zero-dose babies, friends.