Vaccines: Does Europe Do Them Better?

What It Covers

The CDC reduced childhood vaccine recommendations from 17 to 11 diseases, citing Denmark as a model. Science Versus examines whether copying European vaccine schedules makes sense given different healthcare systems and disease prevalence patterns.

Key Questions Answered

• •Healthcare infrastructure matters: Denmark uses targeted outbreak vaccination for meningitis instead of universal coverage, requiring well-resourced contact tracing systems and rapid response capabilities that fragmented US healthcare lacks, making their approach difficult to replicate here.
• •Vaccine effectiveness creates confusion: Hepatitis A appears rare in the US precisely because widespread vaccination stopped community spread through the 1990s. Removing universal recommendations risks resurgence since the disease remains common globally and protection depends on sustained high vaccination rates.
• •RSV guidance buried in footnotes: Babies whose mothers missed pregnancy vaccination windows qualify as high risk for RSV antibody treatment, but this detail appears only in footnotes. Parents reading main schedules may incorrectly assume healthy newborns need no protection against this severe respiratory virus.
• •Rotavirus prevents 62,000 emergency visits annually: The oral vaccine stops 45,000 hospitalizations and 62,000 ER visits yearly from severe diarrhea in US children. Denmark considers it treatable and skips universal vaccination, relying on accessible hospital care Americans may not consistently access.