Elisabeth Marnik’s personal journey from unvaccinated childhood to immunology expert highlights the importance of empathy in addressing vaccine scepticism amid rising exemption rates and falling coverage.
Elisabeth Marnik’s path into immunology began with an unusual personal history: she reached adulthood having had none of the childhood vaccines most people receive in infancy and early school years. At 23, she went to a doctor’s office and asked to be immunised against everything she had missed, then completed the catch-up process at a travel clinic because her regular physician did not carry paediatric vaccines, according to STAT.
That experience now shapes the message she takes into public debate. Marnik, who is now 37 and serves as executive director of The Evidence Collective, argues that embarrassment and brief confrontations rarely change minds about vaccination. In a recent STAT profile, she said many people who support vaccines assume a single conversation should be enough, when her own shift took years of patient discussion with professors and friends.
Her childhood was spent in an evangelical household in Thomaston, Connecticut, where science was presented as running against scripture. Her mother, Teresa Ryan, had been unsettled by a pamphlet describing a child who became ill after vaccination, and when a doctor offered only a firm instruction to follow the immunisation schedule, Ryan refused the shots for her two children. Marnik later attended public school, discovered chemistry and worked her way into research.
One moment that helped alter her view came during college, when she was overwhelmed by family obligations, a failing car and academic pressure. After a flat tyre left her stranded, three professors came to help her in a parking garage, while a church leader’s wife had earlier declined to offer her a place to stay. Marnik has said the contrast between those reactions helped her see that trust and care could matter as much as facts.
Her argument lands at a time when the latest federal data point in the opposite direction. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention says kindergarten vaccine exemptions rose to 4.2 per cent in the 2025 to 2026 school year, up from 3.6 per cent, marking a fourth straight record. Reuters reported that coverage fell for every routinely tracked vaccine, with measles, mumps and rubella coverage at 92.4 per cent, below the 95 per cent level public health officials say helps prevent outbreaks.
Marnik does not argue that mandates should disappear. Instead, she says empathy can sit alongside requirements for school, work in health care or military service, and that some families have had little access to reliable information in the first place. The CDC maintains adult catch-up schedules for people who were never vaccinated or have incomplete records, but Marnik’s story suggests that the hardest part is often not the injections themselves, but the long work of changing what people believe.
Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical judgment, advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
