Vaccine Disinformation is Dividing Families
By: Emily Olson, CHW – Immunize Minnesota Coalition Member
September 10th, 2026
"What will we do after our children are born, before they're able to be vaccinated?" I ask my partner as we leave a family gathering filled with happy, healthy nieces and nephews.
"What do you mean?" he asks.
"I'm worried we will have to distance ourselves from some of your family until our children can be vaccinated.”
He hadn’t thought of that, and I hadn't either, until recently. Many of our family members don’t vaccinate their children. While this has concerned me, I've kept my thoughts to myself. They’re doing what they believe is best, and I respect their right to do so. But after the whirlwind of changes to federal vaccine guidance over the last year, I realized that, at this rate, our children will grow up in a world with more frequent disease outbreaks.
Perhaps it is because I’ve been daydreaming more about starting a family, but this realization has weighed heavily on me. How will our family react if we really do have to distance ourselves from them for years at a time? My daydreams are suddenly filled with conflict. It seems the only solution is to address vaccine disinformation at the highest levels of government.
I learned about the origins of the vaccine disinformation crisis during my graduate program in public health. A paper published in 1998 by Andrew Wakefield sparked widespread fear after falsely linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism. It later emerged that he had manipulated data to win his lawsuit against a vaccine manufacturer. His paper was retracted, and he lost his medical license, but the fear remains.
Many people worry that doctors and the pharmaceutical industry use this kind of manipulation as a marketing tactic for vaccines. Paradoxically, Wakefield and other anti-vaccine activists – including our Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – use strategies like these to sow doubt and profit off of mistrust in research. It’s ultimately much easier for a vaccine opponent to capture and incite public reaction by writing an inflammatory paper than it is for public health agencies to continuously test and monitor vaccines for safety and efficacy and communicate those results. Indeed, research has continued to disprove any link between the MMR vaccine and autism and has shown that side effects of the vaccine are extremely rare. Wakefield’s paper achieved one thing: igniting a resurgence of measles outbreaks.
And a resurgence of measles is bad news for us all. Measles spreads easily and can cause severe symptoms, disability, or death. Some individuals can also develop a fatal, progressive brain condition several years after their infection. Children, especially those too young for the vaccine, are at the highest risk for complications. These children depend on members of the public to be vaccinated so that the virus never reaches them – yet vaccination rates have fallen dramatically. According to the Minnesota Department of Health School Immunization Data portal, many school districts in our area have fewer than 95% of children vaccinated against measles, which is not enough to prevent an outbreak. I’m afraid this will jeopardize the safety of our nieces and nephews, as well as our future children. Given how everything is going, the question of when an outbreak will occur is more relevant than if one will occur.
This concern has grown as parents raise questions about other vaccines. The hepatitis B vaccine, for example, is attracting considerable attention. Parents ask, “If it’s only transmitted through sex and injection drug use, then why would I need to vaccinate my child?”
It’s a fair question, but it shows how misinformation causes a false sense of safety. Hepatitis B spreads silently and makes no exceptions based on age. The virus can survive on surfaces for up to a week. Tiny amounts of dried blood or saliva can contaminate personal care items, home surfaces, or even the toys children play with. People who are exposed early in life may not know they carry it until it causes serious conditions – such as liver cancer – decades later. In fact, half of all people with chronic hepatitis B are unaware they have it. The vaccine, when given early, provides lifelong protection – regardless of how the virus is spread.
Without reliable public health messaging, facts are easily manipulated. Younger generations now learn about polio through social media instead of relatives who lived through the pandemic. Recent posts have resurfaced the falsehood that advancements in sanitation led to the eradication of polio, suggesting that the vaccine was never needed. In reality, the virus had peaked, but only after a great deal of human suffering. Many people had formed natural immunity, while others continued to get sick. Polio was such an obvious threat to children that very few parents objected to the vaccine once it was introduced. Even though the passage of time has veiled us from these traumas, the fact remains that the iron lung is obsolete thanks to the polio vaccine.
Examples like this show the echo chamber of misinformation that parents must navigate. As a result, vaccine hesitancy has grown. Parents underestimate how easily diseases spread, how serious their consequences are, and how much effort it takes to eradicate a disease. More and more parents choose not to vaccinate. And their children may still benefit from a dwindling herd immunity, but this protection is running out.
The disruption does not stop there, either. Vaccination has become a source of disagreement between parents, leaving their children to shoulder the burden. Hillary Moonay, a family law attorney in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, reported to NPR that such disagreements are an increasingly common cause of custody disputes among separated parents. In 2022, her law firm saw cases like this on a near-weekly basis, in sharp contrast to the handful of such cases in her first 20 years in the field. Children have felt forced to pick sides and ultimately resent vaccines for being the source of conflict.
Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in even greater polarization, as people interpreted the fast-changing public health guidance as contradictory. While health professionals took this as a lesson to better reflect the scientific process in communications, vaccine skeptics capitalized on it and were elevated to our highest governing bodies.
The federal government’s unwillingness to publish sound vaccine guidance is failing parents across the United States, making it impossible to make decisions in their children's best interests. Even as a public health professional, it has been hard to keep up with the changing federal guidance. The science denialism spread by RFK Jr. has only exacerbated this issue. Instead of finding clear, reliable answers to vaccine questions, parents and families are left divided. The impact on our children and on family relationships will continue to unfold for years.
As stewards for future generations, we must find ways to come together around these issues to do right by our children. One group of organizations and individuals is launching this month to do just that. Immunize Minnesota is working to improve immunization rates and vaccine confidence for all Minnesotans through community organizing, education, and statewide partnerships. Meanwhile, our federal health officials must reflect on the gravity of their decisions and stop the political weaponization of health guidance – before it is too late.