Counseling families on childhood vaccines comes down to one thing: being able to speak to both efficacy and risk with real precision. Dr. Liz Mumper shows how. Using measles, tetanus, and pertussis as worked examples, she walks through how to calculate what a disease actually risks, how a vaccine that doesn’t stop transmission can shape the pathogen over time, and where the gaps in safety research and regulatory oversight remain. The result is a calm, evidence-first way to weigh the questions families bring to the exam room, using real numbers rather than assumptions.

Learning objectives

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

1. Calculate real-world risks of vaccine-preventable diseases through worked examples for measles and tetanus.
2. Understand how vaccines that do not prevent infection or transmission exert evolutionary pressure on the illness, and how that affects the clinical presentation of that illness, using the pertussis (TDaP) vaccine as an example.
3. Identify gaps in vaccine safety research and regulatory oversight through the examples of under-reporting in VAERS, the inadequacy of vaccine trial follow-up, and the way vaccine trial results are analyzed and reported.