There was a flurry of news reports recently about parents who opt out of having their children vaccinated. Sometimes they don’t vaccinate their kids at all and sometimes it’s only for specific vaccines. This trend has the medical and public health establishment worried.

Their concern is captured by this headline: “Public Health Risk Seen as Parents Reject Vaccines.” It’s feared that children who are not vaccinated will become carriers of disease and cause outbreaks of measles, mumps, diphtheria, rubella, smallpox, whooping cough, and other infectious disease. News articles illustrate this concern with stories of disease clusters popping up where too many children aren’t vaccinated.

Here’s what I wonder: if the parents are willing to leave their children “unprotected” without vaccinations, how does that affect public health? After all, the other, vaccinated children are protected. Right? Well, maybe not. For example, one of the stories told is of a 2006 cluster of 219 people in Iowa who got the mumps—and the majority of them had been vaccinated.

Does that mean vaccination doesn’t work? It means for the people who got mumps it didn’t. Something about their immune systems didn’t protect them. What kind of support would their immune systems need to prevent their getting sick? And if they did get sick, what kind of support would their immune systems need to make their sickness mild and their recovery rapid?

The medical and public health establishment seem to have only one answer: vaccinate. The rationale is that vaccination “trains” the child’s immune system to handle future exposures by developing antibodies. The assumption is that the body protects itself by pulling antibodies from the inventory it’s built.

The discovery over a decade ago of regulatory T-cells is changing this view of how immunity works. Put simply, regulatory T-cells hold back our immune system’s tendency to attack anything it doesn’t like the look of. So training a child’s immune system is more complex than building an inventory of antibodies. Despite this, “Vaccinate!” is the answer we get.

Although forced vaccinations are not upon us yet, the winds are blowing in that direction. For example, a recent recommendation from the CDC panel on vaccinations, which includes experts from academia and industry but not, for example, concerned parents, said that all children between 6 months to 12 years old should be vaccinated for the flu.

Parents who don’t want to get on this train have their work cut out for them. Only about 20 states have provisions for exempting children who attend public school from vaccination for religious or medical reasons. Only a few states have broader provisions that one might call exemption for “philosophical” reasons. Often, the process is grueling. The ACLU has taken up the case of a woman in Southern California whose two applications to her local school board were rejected because her religious convictions were, according to the board, not convincing.

One thing that seems to especially worry the medical and public health establishment is that an increasing number of parents opting out of vaccination are well-educated and middle class. These are well-informed parents who, as alternatives to vaccination, do things like hold measles parties where their children can be exposed to a virus and develop immunity the old-fashioned way. One woman decided against this, not because she didn’t think it would be effective but because she feared her child would be ostracized.

The medical and public health establishment, aided by the media, has embarked on its own campaign of ostracism aimed at parents who buck the system in which vaccination is an article of faith.

So I ask again: if vaccinated children are protected and only unvaccinated children are at risk, then what’s the worry? The answer is that whether your child is vaccinated isn’t the only thing in play. In fact, what’s in play is each child’s unique immune system, its capacity to resist pathogens, and its capacity to recover. Children’s immunity is the result of a wide variety of environmental factors interacting with her or his unique biology.

I’ll give you an example. Pyrethroid, organochlorine, and organophosphate pesticides disrupt cell signaling that directly affects immunity (along with other functions). This happens through the disruption of an enzyme called nitric oxide synthase that affects the ion balance between cells, principally calcium ions. In the developing tissue of children, this can have effects that are more pronounced than in adults. And the specific effect on a specific child depends on how they’re exposed, how much they’re exposed to, and for how long interacting with the ability of the child’s body to clear toxins.

So instead of cleaving to the true religion of vaccination, I think we should ask the right question first. It’s not “Who should be vaccinated?” To which our response is supposed to be “Everyone!” Instead the question is “How do we support our children’s immunity in a way suited to each child’s unique biology and environment?”