Lessons from a vaccinated daughter of a vaccine-hesitant mother

At 23, Elisabeth Marnik sat in a travel clinic waiting anxiously while the staff tried to figure out how to fulfill her unusual request. Marnik wanted to get all of the recommended vaccinations, including MMR (measles, mumps, rubella), DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis), among others. She hadn't received a single vaccine in her life up to that point.

Marnik grew up in a religious household where her mother believed vaccines would do more harm than good. So she never got her kids vaccinated. It’s an increasingly common choice as mistrust in vaccines and in the medical system grows in the United States. During the 2011-2012 school year, 1.4% of kindergartners had nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine requirements, according to Kaiser Family Foundation data. By 2024, the rate had more than doubled, to 3.1%. The trend is partly to blame for recent outbreaks of diseases that for decades were exceedingly rare in the U.S., such as the cluster of measles cases in Texas that’s claimed the lives of two unvaccinated children. The viral disease is a health threat to adults too. In New Mexico, one unvaccinated adult has died of measles, the state’s health department announced on March 6 (it hasn’t been determined whether the infection was the cause of death).

Marnik wanted to protect herself, but soon found out that playing catch-up on vaccines is no small task. Not all clinics and doctors offices are equipped to give the shots, as health care providers generally stick to a schedule determined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to spread out jabs from birth through adolescence. For adults, there’s a schedule recommended by the Department of Health and Human Services, and it allows people 18 and up who didn’t get all their childhood shots to receive them. It would take Marnik a full year to receive all of her shots.

Marnik’s decision to get vaccinated as an adult was driven by her desire to go to graduate school and work in immunology labs. That’s what brought her to the clinic that day. The choice wasn't an easy one but it’s one she doesn’t regret for a second.

Faith and fears: Why 1 mother didn’t vaccinate her kids

Growing up, Marnik’s family life was centered around their church, where she first learned she was unvaccinated. “My mom shared with somebody that she didn’t vaccinate me and my brother because she’d read a book about somebody who went deaf and they blamed the vaccine,” Marnik says, adding that she remembers thinking, “‘That’s interesting; it makes sense why she didn’t vaccinate me.’”

That book, rather than religion, planted a seed of vaccine skepticism in Marnik’s mother. But it melded into her spiritual beliefs too. “My mom was of the mindset that you pray and God will take care of it if that's his will,” Marnik says. Her mother also got a religious exemption from school vaccination requirements for each of her children.

Marnik spent her childhood in and out of public and private schools but didn’t give much thought to what vaccination had to do with her education. In fifth grade, her mother decided to home-school Marnik. She remembers this being due, in part, to Harry Potter being assigned reading. “My mom was like, ‘No, not happening,” recalls Marnik. “She was worried public school was going to corrupt me.”

Homeschooling didn’t involve much actual teaching until Marnik begged her grandmother to buy her a curriculum. Marnik would assign herself schoolwork and grade her own papers from fifth grade on. Finally she convinced her mother to let her return to public school in the 11th grade. “That’s where I had my first official science class, with an actual lab,” she says. “I just loved it; I was obsessed.”

Getting vaccinated for career and community

Marnik loved learning about the world around her. And she was good at it. A teacher took notice and told Marnik she could go to college to study science, a possibility she’d never before considered.

Although Marnik had begun to drift away from Christianity, her religious vaccine exemption followed her to college. “I wasn’t thinking anything of it, but I started learning things like evolution that I’d never learned before,” Marnik says. “I don’t know if I even really understood genetics or the immune system at all before I went to university.” Those subjects became her deepest passions, and Marnik decided she wanted to get a PhD in immunology, the science of the immune system.

That would require countless hours in labs, where she might be coming into contact with pathogens she wasn’t vaccinated against. “As I got closer to [college] graduation, I really started to question how I was raised,” says Marnik. “I understood enough to know I didn’t agree with the decision my mom made, and I was going to get vaccinated before going to grad school.”

She did just that.

Marnik, who ended up working in an immunology and allergy lab, sees vaccination as an extension of the Christian values instilled in her in childhood, as “a way for me to take care of my community,” she says. “That’s something that the Bible taught me: Loving my neighbor, for me, also meant extending that to protecting them from these infectious diseases.”

Lessons from a vaccinated daughter of a vaccine-hesitant mother

The shots themselves didn’t cause Marnik much anxiety, but breaking the news of her vaccinations to her mother did. Marnik waited a full year to tell her mother what she’d done. “She was very mad at me,” Marnik says. “I tried to explain to her the reasons why I did this, but she didn’t want to hear it. I think she felt like I was saying she was a bad mom. But I don’t; I think she did the best that she could.”

As much as she disagrees with her mother’s decision not to vaccinate her children, Marnik is empathetic about the choices she made. “The reason I chose to vaccinate my kids is the same reason my mom didn’t choose to vaccinate me,” she says. “My mom didn’t understand vaccines, and no one was answering her questions about them, so for her, keeping me safe meant not vaccinating me.”

Anxiety over how to best keep your child safe is often high when kids reach the age of their first vaccinations, Marnik says. “Becoming a parent is one of the hardest things you can do. Suddenly, you have this new baby in front of you and you have to make sure they survive.” Adding to that stress is the prevalence of misinformation, particularly regarding vaccines, so it’s not hard to imagine why some parents might consider foregoing vaccination.

Marnik thinks that recognizing the good intentions of vaccine-hesitant people is key to encouraging a change of heart. “I truly believe that most people are wanting to keep themselves and their families safe,” she says. “Conversations about vaccination should start from that common ground.”

Perhaps that's why Marnik made some progress with her own mother. After explaining that measles can "erase your prior immunity" to other infections, her mother conceded that it's OK for kids to be vaccinated against it, Marnik says. Feelings are "not always rational," she says, "but when doing anything, we want to make sure the benefits outweigh the risks, so it took her seeing that there are a lot more risks [to being unvaccinated] than she had accounted for."