Dr. Elizabeth Mumper, IMA Senior Fellow in Pediatric Education and author of IMA’s Parent’s Guide to Childhood Immunizations, has spent four decades caring for children as a board-certified pediatrician. Her thinking on the childhood vaccine schedule has evolved with that experience.
In this clip from her IMA Academy lesson, she takes on the measles headlines. News coverage frames the outbreaks as a problem of too many unvaccinated children. The data she presents says otherwise: even when the MMR schedule is followed appropriately, cyclic recurrences of measles can be expected. Going back to the historical record, she shows that about one in 500,000 deaths in America was from measles before the vaccine existed, and that the mortality rate has stayed remarkably consistent before and after MMR.
The full 53-minute lesson prepares practitioners to discuss childhood vaccines by weighing effectiveness and risk with precision. Using measles, tetanus, and pertussis as examples, Dr. Mumper walks through how to calculate real-world disease risk, how non-sterilizing vaccines create evolutionary pressure on pathogens, and the gaps in safety oversight, from VAERS underreporting to limited follow-up in vaccine trials.
