Babies and children who lack paper vaccination records sometimes receive two or three times the number of vaccines recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to experts who spoke with The Defender. Children whose parents immigrated to the U.S. and who don’t speak English are at the greatest risk.
Many medical providers assume that if there’s no record of a vaccination, the best way to ensure that a child receives the recommended vaccine is to readminister it, according to Rena Maculans, a registered nurse in California. “That’s the mentality of the providers,” she said.
Maculans — who spent 10 years as an emergency department (ER) nurse and later processed autism treatment claims — said urgent care and ER staff typically follow protocols that tell them to vaccinate a child if there’s no documentation of a prior vaccination.
Maculans said she followed those protocols before she realized that vaccines can cause harm. “We were all under the impression, well, if you double up on it, it’s a good thing. You have extra protection.”
Now, Maculans, whose daughter was injured by a COVID-19 vaccine, urges people to carry their immunization record with them. “That’s why I tell people, anytime you go to the doctor or urgent care, bring your immunization records with you.”
Maculans said she began piecing things together while processing medical claims for Partnership HealthPlan of California, a healthcare provider that serves over 900,000 Medi-Cal members in Northern California.
Medi-Cal is the state’s Medicaid program that provides free or low-cost health coverage for low-income individuals and families.
Maculans was a “utilization management nurse coordinator,” which meant she processed medical claims for continuation of services, including autism treatment services. It was her job to determine whether a patient should continue receiving autism treatments, including speech therapy visits, or whether the patient no longer needed the treatments.
She noticed that a highly disproportionate number of the claims were submitted by families that spoke only Spanish. In other words, more Spanish-speaking children reported having continued or increased autism symptoms that required treatment, compared to English-speaking or bilingual kids.
Knowing the link between certain vaccine ingredients and increased autism risk, she suspected that Spanish-speaking Medi-Cal families — such as migrant workers — may experience increased vaccinations due to language barriers and not having their children’s immunization records on hand to prove prior vaccination to medical staff.
California has among the highest autism rates in the country — 1 in 12.5 boys, according to the latest available CDC data.
Maculans acknowledged that she is speculating and that, under HIPAA laws that protect patients’ private health records, she could not take screenshots of the claims that she said would reveal the trends she observed.
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