Parents are often concerned that a child gets too many vaccines and that the number of antigens are too great for their immune systems to cope with. Although children now get more vaccines than ever, the number of antigens that they get have decreased from about 3,200 to approximately 320 as a result of discontinuing the smallpox vaccine and also replacing whole-cell pertussis with an acellular vaccine.12 Vaccines represent only a very small fraction of antigens that a child is exposed to in infancy and early childhood on a day-to-day basis.
Also, many studies have shown that infections unconnected with the disease covered by the vaccine are the same or even less in children who just received a vaccine than those who have not.
