With the Wind with Dr. Paul — Show 207: Pediatric Perspectives: Unvaccinated Kids, Parents Challenges with Katherine Sigblad

What does it look like to raise unvaccinated children with confidence — navigating hospitals, schools, and community while staying grounded in your choices?

I'm joined this week by Katherine Sigblad, host of the Mom's Off the Record podcast and mother of two unvaccinated children in Florida. Katherine brings the perspective of a mom who has thought deeply about these choices — not from theory, but from lived experience. Her eight-week-old daughter's hospital visit tested everything she believed about navigating the medical system, and she came through it with insights worth sharing.

In this episode, we cover:

• What happened when Katherine took her unvaccinated infant to the hospital — and how she handled a doctor who tried to shame her for her choices
• The reality of vaccine shedding: which vaccines shed, what it looks like in practice, and why Katherine doesn't live in fear
• How she builds community as a parent with different views — without isolating her family or compromising her values
• Practical strategies for raising children who question, think critically, and form their own conclusions

When the Hospital Becomes Necessary

Katherine's daughter Lucien was just under eight weeks old when labored breathing and RSV-like symptoms appeared. This was an HVAC baby — home birth after cesarean, born entirely outside the hospital system. Katherine did what any informed parent would do first: percussion on the back to loosen mucus, garlic steamed over a pot for its antiviral properties, rosemary essential oil in a diffuser, and co-sleeping to support nervous system regulation.

When those measures weren't enough — the wheezing continued, the mucus vomited up was significant — Katherine made the call. She had a trusted provider in her corner: an anti-vaccine pediatric physician's assistant who is also an herbalist and a mother. Someone who could look at her daughter in person, run testing, and give an honest assessment. That provider confirmed it was time to go to the hospital.

What happened there is instructive. A young doctor, fresh out of training, went straight to the familiar script: "This wouldn't have happened if you had gotten her vaccinated." Katherine didn't argue. She didn't apologize. She simply said, in effect, "Thank you for your opinion. Moving on — what are we going to do to help her get better?" When you're in the hospital for your child's acute care, it is not the time to educate a provider who isn't open to being educated. That's not capitulation — it's prioritization.

The hospital did what hospitals do well: high-quality suctioning that cleared mucus Katherine couldn't have removed at home. But it also did what hospitals routinely do poorly: a catheterized urine sample returned a false positive for UTI, leading to a round of IV antibiotics her daughter never needed. The next morning, a different doctor confirmed there was no infection. Katherine spent the following months healing her daughter's gut with the GAPS diet, meat stock, and homemade ferments. Her daughter is thriving.

Vaccine Shedding Is Real — and It's Not a Reason to Live in a Bubble

Katherine's son Julian has been in preschool since 18 months old. He's now three and a half. Florida makes exemptions straightforward — she secured religious and then medical exemptions without pushback. In that time, the most notable illness he picked up was chickenpox — from a vaccinated classmate.

The pediatrician they consulted, one who shares their perspective, identified it as an atypical varicella presentation: the kind that can occur when someone who received the live chickenpox vaccine sheds the virus onto an unvaccinated child. It lasted three months, though he wasn't contagious the entire time.

I want to be precise here, because this matters: not all vaccines shed. The live virus vaccines do — measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR), varicella (chickenpox), rotavirus (the oral drops given to infants), and the COVID shot. Rotavirus spreads especially easily in daycare settings where toddlers share objects that go directly into mouths. The COVID shot, of course, should never be given to any child — or any human being.

Katherine's response to all of this is what I want parents to hear. She doesn't keep her son home out of fear. She doesn't live in a bubble. Her view — and I share it — is that when you establish a strong foundation with real food, adequate rest, sunlight, and genuine human connection, children encounter illness from a position of resilience. The benefits of community, peer relationships, and a stimulating school environment far outweigh the risk of exposure to a shed virus. If anything, the fact that the vaccinated can transmit to the unvaccinated is an argument parents should feel free to make matter-of-factly when the topic comes up.

Raising Kids Who Think for Themselves

Katherine and I talked about what it actually looks like to raise critical thinkers — not as an aspiration, but as a daily practice.

Her first piece of advice is refreshingly concrete: stop asking "How was school?" It's the quickest way to end a conversation. The answer will always be "fine," and everyone walks away. Instead, let your child decompress after a long day. Engage them in an activity — deep play, something hands-on — and once they're settled, ask specific, open-ended questions: "Tell me more about that." "Why did you choose that one?" "What did you notice?"

She recommends Tuttle Twins and Brave Books for introducing big concepts in age-appropriate ways. When her son encounters something different from how their family does things — at school, at a friend's house — her response is simple: "Different family, different rules." Then, privately, they can discuss why their family makes the choices they do and why other families might choose differently. No judgment, just clarity.

The old idea that children should be seen and not heard, that they should respect authority without question, directly undermines the goal of raising independent thinkers. You cannot teach a child to think critically while simultaneously demanding blind obedience. Katherine's approach — letting her son take the stage, find his own personality, and prove his point — is exactly the kind of parenting that produces adults who know how to evaluate information rather than simply accept it.

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