Teen Gets Vaccines During Measles Outbreak, Despite Mom's Belief : Shots - Health News : NPR

Ethan Lindenberger is getting vaccinated for well, just about everything.

"God knows how I'm still alive," Lindenberger wrote on Reddit last November.

In his Reddit post, Lindenberger goes on to ask for help figuring out how to get vaccinated. He got more than 1,000 responses. His post joins similar ones from other unvaccinated teenagers trying to get their shots, despite their parents' beliefs.

He's 18 years old, but had never received vaccines for diseases like hepatitis, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, or the chickenpox.

Lindenberger's mother, Jill Wheeler, is anti-vaccine. He said she has been influenced by online misinformation, such as a debunked study that claimed certain vaccines were linked with autism, or a theory that vaccines cause brain damage. Incorrect ideas like these have spread like wildfire, so much so that the CDC has explicitly tried to combat them, posting pages like "Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism"

Lindenberger's eldest sister is vaccinated, and his eldest brother is partially immunized, but once his mother found out that she had the right to opt-out of vaccinations, she chose not to vaccinate her younger five children.

Charlie Hinderliter wasn't opposed to the flu shot. He didn't have a problem with vaccinations. He was one of about 53 percent of Americans who just don't get one.

"I figured [the flu] was something that's dangerous to the elderly and the young, not somebody who is healthy and in their 30s," says Hinderliter, who is 39 and the director of government affairs at the St. Louis Realtors association.

"Turns out, I was wrong," he says.

An estimated 80,000 Americans died of the flu, or flu-related complications, last winter, according to initial estimates from CDC presented in September. It was the highest number of flu related deaths in decades, and Hinderliter was nearly among them. Now, after 58 days in the hospital, a week in a medically induced coma, two surgeries and three weeks in a nursing home, he's speaking out to encourage everyone to do something he'd never done before: Get a flu shot.

For Parents: Vaccines for Your Children

NPR's Denise Guerra contributed to this report and produced this story for broadcast.

Teen Gets Vaccines During Measles Outbreak, Despite Mom's Belief : Shots - Health News : NPR: Ethan Lindenberger had never received vaccines for diseases like polio or measles because his mom is anti-vaccine. Now he's 18, he's finally getting his shots.