Mom changes her mind about vaccines after her 7 children get whooping cough

The whooping cough vaccine.
(Image credit: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

A Canadian mother of seven who did not have her children vaccinated is urging other parents not to go down the same path, now that all of her kids have pertussis.

In a post for The Scientific Parent, Tara Hills wrote that she thought her children had a common cold, but after a week of coughing that was becoming progressively worse, she determined something else was going on. "My youngest three children were coughing so hard they would gag or vomit," she wrote. "I'd never seen anything like this before." Once it was confirmed by emergency room doctors that the culprit was whooping cough, the family was put into quarantine.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.