And according to infectious disease experts, the longer a vaccine is delayed for a child, the longer the child is at risk for contracting a potentially preventable and debilitating disease.
"Sears' proposed schedules ... are really not ideal for protecting that baby," Schaffner said. "This alternative schedule may respond to parental anxiety at the price of keeping the baby susceptible to serious infectious diseases for a longer period of time."
According to Schaffner, many parents' anxiety over vaccine safety and eagerness to find an alternative vaccine schedule for their children has increased exponentially.
"There's been an awful lot of anxiety expressed in the media about vaccines and allegations about vaccines," Schaffner said. "And most importantly, as the diseases that vaccines prevent have disappeared, our young parents have no personal experience of these diseases and neither do their parents."
Additionally, Offit remarks in his report that the vaccine schedule proposed by Sears was not tested for safety and efficacy in any clinical trials, and is not backed up by the same body of evidence as the CDC's recommended vaccine schedule.
Dr. Peter Hotez, professor and chairman of the department of microbiology and tropical medicine at The George Washington University, said recommending alternative vaccine guidelines to the public without any scientific evidence to support the safety and efficacy of such recommendations "makes no sense."
"Altering the schedule without the support of clinical trial data creates a severe risk for inadequate vaccine," Hotez said. "So, any delayed schedule risks creating a vaccine schedule that won't give you as much of a robust immune response as the recommended schedule."
"I will follow the new CDC recommendations for my children," he added.
But Sears said he believes many vaccine experts are misinterpreting his work as "anti-vaccine," while his intent in offering an alternative vaccine schedule was to show parents who might not otherwise vaccinate their children at all that they can immunize their children in ways with which they may feel more comfortable.
"While Dr. Offit and I share the same opinion on the importance of vaccines, at the end of the day we will have to continue to agree to disagree on one major point: He believes that offering parents the option of an alternative vaccine schedule that spreads out the shots and allows worried parents to vaccinate their babies in a manner they are more comfortable with, will result in lower vaccination rates because it legitimizes these parents' fears about vaccines," Sears said. "I, on the other hand, believe that providing parents who otherwise would not vaccinate at all with a schedule of vaccines that they feel right about for their baby, will encourage such parents to vaccinate."
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