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Our daughter’s pediatrician called us at the hospital within a few hours and recognized the symptoms. Our baby had experienced an incredibly rare side effect, called a hypotonic-hyporesponsive episode, from one of her vaccines. This syndrome is so uncommon that there aren’t even agreed-upon statistics about how rare it is. The most comprehensive study on this syndrome was published back in 2000 in the journal Pediatrics; it found that just 38 reported U.S. cases occurred in 1998.

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I was exhausted, emotionally drained — and I was angry. Here we were, parents who did everything right for our baby, and the very thing that was supposed to protect her ended up hurting her. Every instinct in me wanted to protect this fragile, tiny person who in just a few short months had become my whole world. Were my husband and I crazy to keep vaccinating her? Are vaccines more dangerous than the dangers they kept away?

While our baby was tethered overnight to monitors and wires to track her brain’s electrical activity, I obsessively scoured the Web for information.

The good news was that hypotonic-hyporesponsive episodes aren’t known to have lasting side effects. It was a random event, unlikely ever to happen to our daughter again.

According to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a federal system for self-reporting problems with immunizations, approximately 10 million vaccines per year are given to children younger than 1 year old. Out of the millions of vaccines given each year, only 3,900 serious adverse events are reported by health-care providers or the public to the government database. And not all of these events are in fact linked to vaccines; some adverse reactions can be caused by unrelated illnesses.