Pediatrician in Macomb Stands Firm Against Anti-Vaccine Families
As soon as my wife got pregnant with our first child, we already knew who the baby’s pediatrician would be. Last year, I wrote a story for the Community News Brief reporting on Dr. Mary Kathleen Lockard’s 20-year anniversary of pediatric practice in Macomb, and I was excited to take advantage of her services. Last month, we took our daughter for her first checkup with Dr. Lockard, and everything went smoothly: the baby was measured and weighed, her heartbeat was listened to, and Dr. Lockard gave us advice on what products to use for dry skin and how to handle indigestion.
Towards the end of the checkup, the baby also received her second dose of the Hepatitis B vaccine.
Dr. Lockard is a staunch believer in the importance of vaccines for her patients. The website for Macomb Medical Group, her practice, stresses the importance of vaccines for preventing illness and saving lives. They cite the vaccine schedule endorsed by The American Academy of Pediatrics as their guiding star for immunization policy, and they refuse to take patients unless they receive at least the following vaccinations: DTaP/ Tdap, polio, Hib, Prevnar, MMR, Varicella, and meningococcus.
I asked Dr. Lockard why she felt so strongly about vaccination. “My feelings are rooted in many years of study, practice, and realworld observation and also the knowledge that vaccines have been extremely well studied for many years,” she said. “Vaccines are absolutely essential for a child’s health, and I want to do everything that I can to ensure that my patients get everything necessary to be as healthy as they can and protected as they can.”
My wife and I agree with this rationale and trust Dr. Lockard, so we had no problem taking our daughter see her. Several local families, however, have refused to enroll their children as patients with Macomb Medical Group because of their vaccination policy.
Over the past few decades and especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more Americans are becoming vaccine skeptical or outright anti-vaxx. Last year, Gallup released the results of a poll where they asked people about the importance of vaccinating children, and only 69% responded that it was either very important or extremely important. This represents a 25-point drop from 2001, when 94% percent of Americans said vaccination was either very or extremely important. Childhood vaccination rates have correspondingly slipped around the country with 77% of U.S. counties and jurisdictions reporting a significant drop since 2019 according to an NBC News investigation.
It is an active debate within pediatrics circles how to respond to parents who don’t want to vaccinate their children. To be clear, the debate is not over the general efficacy of vaccines, which the overwhelming majority of licensed pediatricians believe in strongly. Rather, the question is over what the best course of action is given that a large and growing percentage of the population is vaccine skeptical. Contrary to Dr.
Lockard’s approach, some pediatricians choose not to dismiss patients even if their parents refuse to vaccinate.
The thinking here goes that by not refusing them outright, pediatricians can build trust with vaccine skeptical parents, provide some care for their children, and perhaps over time convince the parents to let their children get some or all of the vaccines on the vaccine schedule.
Dr. Lockard also used to accept children of vaccine skeptical parents and try her best to persuade them that vaccination really was the best course for their child. She was astounded by the resistance that many of these parents showed towards what she knew to be sound and established medicine, and she was worn down by the debates.
About ten years ago, she decided she needed to adopt her current policy dismissing families who won’t vaccinate.
“As I got busier and busier over my first ten years of practice, I had to make some decisions about how was it best for me to spend my time and energy,” Dr.
Lockard commented. “As I got extremely busy, I started thinking that a lot of these conversations or arguments I was getting into over and over again not only took a lot of time in the office, but they also were very stressful mentally . . . I didn’t want to keep having those same conversations over and over with the same person over and over when I knew it wasn’t going to lead anywhere.”
She repeatedly stressed how time is a precious resource in her practice. The high demand for her services reflects a general shortage in American pediatric care, which was drearily hailed as “medicine’s largest skeleton crew” in an opinion piece by Stat News last year. Inpatient pediatric facilities decreased by nearly 20% since 2008, with the loss of service being especially pronounced in rural areas like McDonough County.
Dr. Lockard also listed some other reasons why she refuses to take patients whose families won’t vaccinate.
One is that she doesn’t want to put her other patients at risk through exposure to unvaccinated people. Some diseases like measles—which has experienced several recent outbreaks across the U.S. because of the falling vaccination rates—spread incredibly quickly and can easily jump between individuals in the space of a clinic. Dr.
Lockard also said that there was a real legal concern that parents might try to sue her if their child gets sick or dies of a vaccine-preventable illness while under her care.
Further, Dr. Lockard went on to express concerns with anti-vaxxers in positions of power on the national level.
In June, US Health Secretary and notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired and replaced all of the independent vaccine advisors on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the body responsible for determining the CDC’s vaccine schedule. Last month, he made news again when he laid off outright all of the committee’s support staff. This loss of personnel makes it likely that the CDC won’t be able to publish its new vaccine schedule when it’s due on January 1st of next year. The new vaccine schedule is required by Vaccines for Children (VFC), a program that provides vaccines for 52% of children in America. Dr. Lockard confirmed that VFC provides her practice with vaccines, and the effects could be devastating if the new vaccine schedule doesn’t go through: “The VFC program . . . provides vaccines to clinics and health departments in order to vaccinate Medicaid kids or uninsured kids,” said Dr, Lockard. “We have a huge proportion of Medicaid families here in Macomb, and so if I lose access to the VFC vaccines, it would absolutely wreak havoc on our ability to maintain vaccination rates.”
Dr. Lockard maintains hope, though, that the CDC will pull through and still publish its vaccine schedule despite all.
Talking to Dr. Lockard, I was surprised she had received so much resistance on the vaccine front given her strong credentials and long record of community service.
Dr. Lockard also still seemed a little surprised by it, and hurt as well. She says that she eventually came to the conclusion that families’ unwillingness to vaccinate wasn’t really about her or her effectiveness as a doctor, and she accepts that there’s only so much she can do to combat anti-vaccine disinformation or convince people that vaccinating really is what’s best for their child.
Still, she said it was hard for her not to take it personally, commenting, “It really does break my heart to think that I can’t convince somebody to do the right thing.”
