Their parents never got them vaccinated. As young adults, they faced a choice.
Some who received little to no vaccination in childhood sought out the shots themselves in adulthood — and risked family relationships.
At 30 years old, Lacie Madison just assumed she was fully vaccinated her entire life. But when she got a job at a hospital and was required to check her immunity, the doctor called with shocking news: It appeared she was barely vaccinated as a child, if at all.
“I just said, ‘Are you kidding me?’” recalled Madison, now 39.
Madison, who was mostly home-schooled as a child in Montana, is part of a small but growing population of U.S. adults who did not receive routine childhood vaccines — a result of parents skipping or delaying shots for their kids over religious or personal reasons, including concerns about safety.
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Immediately after learning about her lack of antibodies from her doctor in 2017, Madison scheduled the next available appointment at the hospital’s clinic. According to medical records shared with The Washington Post, Madison then spent the next year catching up on immunizations for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR); chicken pox; and hepatitis B — viruses that have been largely controlled in the U.S. because of widespread immunization. She was nervous about the potential side effects, and braced for impact.
Instead, she said, she hardly felt more than a sore arm from receiving so many shots.
“I’m grateful that science and herd immunity kept me safe while I was unvaccinated,” said Madison, who now lives in Hampton, Virginia. “And I’m happy that I had the ability to amend that.”
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But for 26-year-old Emma Sonas, a childhood bout with whooping cough was so debilitating that she is still dealing with the consequences.
Sonas, who was delivered in a home birth, said she did not receive a single vaccine growing up. When she was 13, Sonas, along with her mom and siblings, caught whooping cough, a highly contagious respiratory infection that leads to uncontrollable coughing fits as the person gasps for air. Sonas’s symptoms were so severe that she slept upright in her bed for months. Otherwise, she’d wake up and feel like she was drowning.
“My respiratory system has never been the same,” she said. “The idea that a choice my parents made has resulted into something like this has been really hard to understand and deal with.”
Sonas — who started catching up on her missed childhood vaccines in 2019, according to medical records — said she spent “a lot of time” being angry about her parents’ decision. But she has since realized that they thought they were just doing what was best for her.
“It is such a complicated thing to hold, because it was a choice that hurt me,” she said.
