At 30, Lacie Madison assumed she’d received the standard childhood vaccines. She’d never had a reason to doubt it. But when a new job at a hospital required her to confirm immunity, the results stunned her: she appeared to have received few, if any, routine shots as a child.
“I just said, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Madison recalled. She’s 39 now.
Raised mostly homeschooled in Montana, Madison is part of a small but increasingly visible group of U.S. adults who didn’t get regular childhood vaccinations. Their parents skipped or delayed shots for religious or personal reasons, including worries about safety and distrust of medicine. As some states move to expand exemptions or even remove school vaccine requirements, stories like Madison’s may become less unusual. Lower vaccination rates mean more children are likely to reach adulthood without protection from serious illnesses — and have to make that choice on their own once they turn 18. Catch-up vaccination is possible, but delaying shots can carry long-term risks, and some vaccines work best earlier in life.
Interviews with more than a dozen adults who grew up unvaccinated — and some of their parents — show how these decisions echo into adulthood. Many came from vaccine-skeptical households long before the coronavirus pandemic and before Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. amplified similar views from a national platform.
Some adults didn’t realize how unprotected they were until they tried to enlist in the military or enter health care, where proof of immunity is often required. Others suffered vaccine-preventable diseases and still live with the effects. A few chose to get vaccinated quietly after turning 18, leaning on mentors or relatives rather than telling their parents.
When Madison learned about her lack of antibodies in 2017, she booked the earliest appointment she could. Medical records show she spent the next year catching up on vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR); chicken pox; and hepatitis B — illnesses once common but now largely controlled in the U.S. because of widespread immunization. She braced for serious side effects.
Instead, she said, she felt little more than a sore arm.
“I’m grateful that science and herd immunity kept me safe while I was unvaccinated,” said Madison, now living in Hampton, Virginia. “And I’m happy that I had the ability to amend that.”
Most American parents still support vaccinations. But a Washington Post-KFF poll this summer found that about 1 in 6 parents have delayed or skipped at least some vaccines for their children (not including coronavirus or flu shots). Religious or personal exemptions have risen in 36 states and Washington, D.C., with 17 states reporting exemption rates above 5 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Public health experts warn rates could fall further as Kennedy continues to raise safety concerns that scientific research has not supported.
The U.S. is currently seeing its highest number of measles cases in 33 years, along with a jump in pertussis — better known as whooping cough. Specialists say misinformation, which surged during the pandemic, is a major driver of the decline.
For Madison’s parents, Russ and Julie Pierry, the choice not to vaccinate their children in the 1980s came from mistrust of the medical system. They said they were uneasy about the growing list of recommended shots and didn’t believe their doctor was guiding them well.
They think Madison, their oldest child, received a few vaccines at birth, though they can’t say which ones. After that, they ignored the immunization schedule and boosters. When they enrolled her briefly in a Christian private school, they obtained a religious exemption.
“We didn’t have anything against the shots, political or religious,” Julie Pierry said. “It just seemed like a waste of time.”
Long-term consequences
Vaccines, doctors say, suffer partly from their own success. They’ve controlled diseases like polio and smallpox so effectively that many people today can’t picture how destructive outbreaks once were.
But for Emma Sonas, 26, the consequences are personal and ongoing. She was born at home and received no vaccines growing up. At 13, she and her family contracted whooping cough, a highly contagious respiratory infection that can cause violent coughing fits and a terrifying struggle for breath. Sonas said her symptoms were so severe she slept upright for months; lying down made her 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 began catching up on missed vaccines in 2019, according to her medical records. For years, she said, she felt deep anger about her parents’ decision. Over time, she came to believe they truly thought they were protecting her.
“It is such a complicated thing to hold, because it was a choice that hurt me,” she said.
Her mother, Christina Sonas, said she “sides with nature” and has long distrusted pharmaceutical companies. She added that she accepts the science behind vaccines and did get the coronavirus vaccine to protect immunocompromised relatives — including her daughter. When her children were young, she said it didn’t feel necessary to vaccinate them because they were homeschooled, and she tried to isolate them when sick.
When they came down with whooping cough, she said she felt she’d failed.
“I did feel as a non-vaccinating parent that I needed to be very attentive to my kids’ health,” she said. “It was part of my responsibility to them and to public health.”
Not receiving vaccines on schedule can leave people exposed to highly contagious illnesses like pertussis and measles, said James Campbell, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at the University of Maryland Children’s Hospital and School of Medicine. He noted that some shots — including the vaccine for HPV, which can prevent the vast majority of cancers caused by the virus — are more effective when given younger.
Still, some parents see those risks as worth the autonomy. Jeremy Newman, vice president of policy and litigation at the Texas Homeschool Coalition, said he and his wife vaccinated their oldest child, now 7, but grew uneasy after reading about possible side effects. Their two younger children received only the DTaP vaccine (which includes protection for tetanus). A pediatrician they consulted told them other vaccines, such as those for polio and measles, weren’t necessary.
Newman said he isn’t against vaccines, but views government mandates as coercive — and says that pressure erodes trust.
“The mandates are the thing that makes it so political right now,” he said.
“Trust is everything”
Adults from different generations described parents who doubted vaccines for diseases that seemed distant or rare. Some grew up in rural areas with limited health care access. Others had parents who rarely took them to doctors. A few recalled hearing conspiracy theories that have long circulated about vaccines.
“They were like, ‘You’re going to die, you’re going to get autism,’” said Jackson Veigel, 38.
Veigel said his parents filed a religious exemption for his public school in Los Angeles, then moved him to a Christian private school that shared their skepticism. When he started getting vaccinated in his 20s — including for polio, whooping cough, and measles — it felt like rebellion against a worldview he now rejects.
“I was just like, ‘Load me up, Doc,’” he said.
For some families, these choices created lasting fractures. One woman in her 20s, who works for a federal health agency and spoke anonymously to avoid backlash, said her mother’s distrust of conventional medicine deepened over time. She stopped taking her children to routine checkups and eventually became an anti-vaccine activist.
“I know every time I get a vaccine it’s a crack in the relationship with my mom,” she said. “It’s like a betrayal to her.”
Madison’s relationship with her own parents took a different turn. When she decided to get vaccinated, she said they supported her. But during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, they were indifferent about the vaccine while living in rural Montana and quarantining at home.
They told her they felt the same uncertainty they’d felt decades earlier: they didn’t trust the information they were hearing or the people delivering it. Madison kept talking with them about the evidence for the vaccine’s benefits and risks. Eventually, they agreed to get it.
Her parents say her persistence helped shift their thinking about vaccines more broadly. If they had a baby today, Russ Pierry said, they would make a different choice.
With so much competing information now, he added, “you really gotta pay attention, and not fall for the propaganda. Just give us the information and let us make our own decision.”
