The March 31 article "Tots need lots of shots" represents the current state of affairs with respect to the safety of the vaccine schedule. The schedule has never been subjected to a study to determine its safety.

A bill in Congress, HR-2832, the Comprehensive Comparative Study of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Populations Act of 2007, would direct the National Institutes of Health to do this. When the Centers for Disease Control's schedule had a total of 10 shots in 1983, the risk of autism was 1 in 10,000. Now that it's 36 shots, the risk is 1 in 150, with boys three to four times more likely to be autistic. Many doctors and researchers cite studies that present data disturbing enough in terms of a potential link between vaccines and autism to warrant a safety study of the vaccine schedule. Let's keep this in the realm of science and evidence-based medicine by having this study done, and not misrepresenting the issue as essentially resolved.

Unfortunately, many pediatricians do not question what they've been taught and do not perform the research, instead relying on the official responses of the American Academy of Pediatricians. Parents need to be collaborative and realize that policy is always years behind the necessary research. Until that study is done, adding more shots to a developing immune system and, worse, combining multiple vaccines in one shot should be seriously reconsidered. At the very least, separation of each shot to give the child's immune system time to recover should be normal practice.

Other steps that can be considered include waiting to start the shots until the immune system is more developed or delaying certain vaccines, checking concentrations for a successful immunization to avoid unnecessary shots and questioning the need for vaccines such as hepatitis, which were targeted for a special subset of the population — mothers who are illegal drug users. With the known neurotoxins such as aluminum as well as vaccine over-stimulation of the immune system, we need to be very careful.