Rising vaccine skepticism worries scientists — and Long Island parents of kids with cancer

Until she started kindergarten in September, 5-year-old Ella Wanderer had lived her life mostly in isolation.

Just before turning 2, the Babylon girl was diagnosed with leukemia, and that, along with chemotherapy and radiation treatments, weakened her immune system so much that in her most vulnerable periods, even a cold could have killed her.

It was too risky to send Ella to preschool, said her mother, Christie Wanderer. Her child couldn’t receive vaccines. The only other kid she saw for months at a time was her younger brother, Robert.

But Wanderer worried that her daughter was falling further behind in her social and emotional development, so as Ella's immune system and general health began improving after a bone-marrow transplant — Robert was the donor — she enrolled her in kindergarten.

Ella still is highly vulnerable to infection. A disease like measles "could be fatal," her mother said. But she assumed all the other kids attending school with Ella were vaccinated, as state law requires.

So Wanderer is shocked that some Long Island parents may be sending their children to school unvaccinated with false documents to fool school administrators and get around state immunization requirements.

The thought that other parents could be putting her child at risk of severe disease or death "seems just unfathomable," she said.

And she's concerned that rising vaccine skepticism could lead to a resurgence of diseases that scientists had hoped had been confined to the past.

The state Health Department’s allegations that former Amityville nurse practitioner Julie DeVuono falsified records of potentially hundreds of children from across the Island, and from New York City and upstate, is a sign of a growing nationwide skepticism and hostility toward vaccines. Scientists and parents fear that, as a result, diseases like polio that had been eliminated in the United States will again kill and sicken children.

The dwindling number of people who remember the lethality of vaccine-preventable diseases, distrust of the COVID-19 vaccine and pandemic-era mandates, and the increasing spread of false information online are leading more Americans to question the longtime scientific consensus endorsing children’s vaccinations, experts say.

New York and every other state currently require that children receive immunizations against diseases such as polio, mumps and diphtheria to attend school or day care. Vaccinations aren't required for home-schooled children.

Parents’ choices to not vaccinate their children, and to falsely claim to school officials that their children are immunized, mean other parents are "functionally being lied to," said Dr. Jennifer Duchon, the pediatric epidemiologist for the Mount Sinai Health System.

"People talk about their personal choice, but someone around you has not made the choice to expose their child to an infectious disease," she said.

The argument that parents should have the right to choose whether to vaccinate their children to attend school is central to the anti-vaccination movement, which has been energized by the appointment of vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary. It's the same one Florida's surgeon general focused on last year when he announced his state would end vaccine mandates.

"If the government can inject your children with products you've got no control over, then the government essentially owns your child, and they supersede parental power," said Del Bigtree, founder of the Informed Consent Action Network, which opposes vaccine mandates. 

Bigtree disputes assertions by major medical organizations that vaccines are safe and effective, and that they protect children like Ella.

Bigtree opposes falsifying vaccine records, because it's illegal, and he said parents could move to states that have broader exemptions from vaccine mandates.

On Thursday, vaccine skeptics expressed disappointment in President Donald Trump’s nomination of Dr. Erica Schwartz to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, because they view her as too supportive of vaccines.

Nearly 3% of American kids — that's more than 2 million children — are immunocompromised, a 2020 study found. Some have immunodeficiency disorders or cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma, and others are undergoing treatments like chemotherapy or are taking immunosuppressant medications.

Diseases bouncing back

As more parents opt not to vaccinate their children, outbreaks of diseases like measles are increasing, presaging a future of more kids getting severely ill and dying of illnesses that until recently were thought to be "essentially eliminated," said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.

Before the 1963 release of a measles vaccine, 400 to 500 people a year died of the disease and nearly 50,000 were hospitalized annually, some with conditions that led to permanent brain damage or other serious complications. Thousands had died of diseases like polio and diphtheria.

But today, "in the absence of actually seeing the deadly effects or the harmful effects of disease, it's hard for [some] people to understand why a vaccination would be helpful," said Perry Halkitis, a public health psychologist and dean of the Rutgers School of Public Health in New Jersey.

Immunization with the combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine in South Carolina, home to an outbreak this year that has sickened nearly 1,000 people, and Texas, where an outbreak last year killed 6-year-old and 8-year-old girls, has been steadily falling in recent years, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows. Almost all of those sickened were unvaccinated.

New York’s kindergarten vaccination rates have remained steady. Unlike most states, New York does not offer non-medical exemptions to attend school, a practice it ended in 2019 in response to measles outbreaks in Brooklyn and Rockland County.

Support for requiring vaccinations to attend public schools slipped from 82% in 2019 to 69% in 2025, according to Pew Research Center surveys. Almost all that decrease occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic and among Republicans, who also are much more likely to express unease about vaccines' safety.

"Our political polarization and our very siloed media environment are contributing to the political patterns that we see in trust in vaccines," said Elena Conis, a professor of history and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on the history of vaccine skepticism.

As long as there have been vaccines, some people have opposed them, she said. That includes the vaccine against smallpox, which killed roughly 300 million people worldwide until widespread immunization led to the eradication of the disease. Opposition to immunization increases when the government imposes mandates, which some see as a violation of their personal liberty, she said.

The backlash to COVID-19 vaccine requirements, as well as lockdowns and mask mandates, exacerbated an already growing skepticism of childhood vaccines, Conis said.

"It really rocked trust in public health, and that extended to trust in [childhood] vaccines, because that trust was already on shaky ground," Conis said.
In addition, public health officials didn't explain well how the COVID-19 vaccine was developed and how it worked, Halkitis said.

With all vaccines, people are bombarded online by falsities and distortions, and they don't know what to believe, Schaffner said.

"With all of that easy access to good information, misinformation and disinformation, you can see why there's so much more confusion, concern, hesitancy and questioning on the part of parents of young children, as well as adults who are scheduled for vaccination," he said.

Ella's rebound

Wanderer said she understands why some parents are wary of vaccines because of what they read online, but, she said, "I just hope people really take the time to educate themselves on what vaccines have accomplished."

Ella’s chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant wiped out any protection her pre-leukemia vaccines provided. Her revaccinations, and new immunizations, began in October and must be spaced out, so she won’t be fully vaccinated until about August 2027.

Ella was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a cancer in which the bone marrow creates so many dysfunctional white blood cells that healthy blood cells are crowded out and the body is less able to fight infections. After the chemotherapy Ella received was not enough to stop the cancer from coming back, she underwent the bone marrow transplant in June 2024.

Before the transplant, Ella received further chemotherapy and radiation that "essentially wipes out any inkling of immunity you have left in your body" so she could accept her brother's bone marrow, Wanderer said.

As Ella's body slowly began building back her immunity, Wanderer, after consulting with her daughter's Stony Brook Medicine doctors, decided that the benefits of Ella attending kindergarten outweighed the risks. And Ella has flourished, Wanderer said.

"She's just living her best little kindergarten life," Wanderer said.