Wellness Wednesday Issue #188

💳 Women will control two-thirds of US wealth by 2030. Six moves to be ready.

🧠 What happens to your brain when you keep reading regularly.

💼 How to negotiate your salary in 2026: what’s changed and how to use it.

💆🏻 A new study says mineral sunscreen helps fight wrinkles, too.

You’re filling out school enrollment forms. There’s a section for immunization records. You dig out a shot record from your kid’s last pediatrician visit, scan it, and wonder, “Is this all of them? Am I supposed to have done something else?”.

And while you’re at it, you vaguely remember seeing something on social media about vaccines that made you nervous, but you also can’t remember if it was from a reliable source or someone’s cousin.

Here’s a no-drama breakdown of what vaccines actually do, what to watch for after your kid gets one, why some people are skeptical (and why that skepticism has real history behind it), and what you actually need for school.

How Vaccines Work

Your immune system fights off illness by creating antibodies, proteins that target specific pathogens. The first time it encounters something new, it takes time to build that response. That window is when you get sick.

Vaccines give your immune system a preview. They introduce a harmless piece of a pathogen (a weakened version, a surface protein, or instructions for your cells to recognize it) so your body can build antibodies and store memory cells, without you having to get sick first. If you’re exposed to the real thing later, your immune system already knows what to do.

Most people feel a sore arm, mild fever, or fatigue for a day or two after a shot. That’s a normal immune response. Severe reactions are rare — roughly 1-2 per million doses. It’s why you’re asked to wait 15 minutes after getting vaccinated.

Why We Need Them

Vaccines protect the person who gets them, and also the people around them who can’t protect themselves. Some people are immunocompromised, meaning their immune systems are too weak to fight off infection effectively. This includes:

• Children too young for certain vaccines
• People undergoing chemotherapy or radiation
• Organ transplant recipients on immunosuppressive drugs
• People with certain chronic conditions or autoimmune disorders

When enough people in a community are vaccinated, disease can’t spread easily. This is called herd immunity, and it’s the main line of protection for the people who can’t protect themselves.

Why People Hesitate

Vaccine skepticism has two distinct roots:

The misinformation thread: In 1998, a researcher named Andrew Wakefield published a study in The Lancet claiming the MMR vaccine caused autism. The study involved 12 children.

Investigations later found Wakefield had manipulated data and was secretly funded by lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers. The Lancet retracted the study in 2010. Dozens of large studies have since found no link between vaccines and autism. The myth, however, spread globally before the retraction and has never fully gone away.

The institutional distrust thread: For communities that have experienced medical exploitation, skepticism of health institutions has real historical roots.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which the U.S. government withheld treatment from Black men with syphilis for decades without their consent, is one documented example. That history shapes how some communities receive medical recommendations today, and it’s a legitimate part of this conversation.

These two threads (misinformation and earned distrust) are different. Knowing which one you’re working from helps you figure out what questions to actually ask.

What The Options Are

For school enrollment, every U.S. state requires certain vaccines, but the specific list varies. The vaccines required in most states for kindergarten entry are DTaP, MMR, polio, and varicella (chickenpox). Most states also require hepatitis B. Check the CDC’s school vaccination requirements page or your state’s Department of Health for the full current list.

If you don’t want to vaccinate your child, exemptions exist in most states:

• Medical exemptions: Available in all 50 states; requires a physician to document a specific medical reason.
• Religious exemptions: Available in 45 states.
• Philosophical or personal belief exemptions: Available in 16 states.

Four states only allow medical exemptions: California, Connecticut, Maine, and New York. State exemption rules vary. Check your state health department directly for the current process.

Vaccines save lives, and the conversation around them deserves more than an argument in the comment sections on social media. If you’ve carried questions you felt you couldn’t ask out loud, or had a reaction that got brushed off, you weren’t wrong to wonder.

The more grounded you are in what’s actually true — how they work, what risks are real, what your state allows — the better you can show up for yourself and the people you love.

Your managers are making compliance mistakes right now, and most of them don’t even know it.

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At my heaviest and unhealthiest, I was 20lbs up and convinced the problem was everything except me. The biggest lesson of my whole health and fitness journey came down to four words: it’s up to me.

My excuses were just that. Excuses.

And I had plenty of “reasons” why I couldn’t work out. “I don’t have time.” “I don’t know what workouts to do.” “I’m just naturally bigger.” “I don’t even care how I look.” “I love food too much.”

Every single one of them was a load of crap.

So in the most loving, sisterly, tough love way, I’m here to tell you: girl, your wellness is up to you.

(And yes, things like metabolic syndrome, PCOS/PMOS, chronic illness, and other medical conditions make this genuinely harder. I have PCOS/PMOS myself. I get it.)

Let’s take these one at a time

“I don’t have time.” Then make it. If something matters to you, you find the time. Your calendar already proves this. Family, friends, work, they all make the cut and fill your week. So why doesn’t your health? It does now.

“I don’t know what workouts to do.” Then learn. Hire someone for a single session. Google it. Ask AI to build you a plan around the twenty minutes and zero equipment you actually have.

“I’m just naturally bigger.” That one was my own defense mechanism for years. What I actually wanted was to feel confident and healthy in my body. We all want the experience of walking out of a fitting room and rejecting the outfit because the style or fit was wrong, not because we feel our body composition is to blame.

Every woman I coached started right here

I spent years as a health and fitness coach for busy corporate women just like me, and every single one of them arrived with a self-limiting belief tucked in her back pocket.

But once they made up their minds and picked their why, they found a way around every obstacle standing between them and their goals. Sometimes that even meant letting go of unsupportive partners and inner circles.

(Weird things happen when you grow physically, mentally, and emotionally. You outgrow the things and the people who no longer fit the improved version of you. It unlocks something.)

You’ll look back and see it was possible

And then they’d look back at those same excuses and go, “Oh my God. Those were all excuses. I’m in charge of my life and my wellness.”

“Waking up early for a 20 minute workout before the kids get up is hard, but man, do I feel better.”

“I can run on my lunch hour if I block it in my calendar and tell my team what I’m working toward, so they can support me and respect my boundaries around that hour.”

“I can meal prep and eat better, even if it costs me a little more time on Sunday. I feel so much better when I fuel my body well.”

So I say this with love

If you have a desire to be healthier and fitter, then let’s freaking do it.

The only thing standing in your way is you. Make the decision. Commit. Go after it.

The same way you do when your boss drops an impossible project on your desk. The same way you worked your toosh off for that promotion. The same way you hyper focused on some skill you had no idea how to do, researched it all weekend, and walked in Monday with the answer the whole team needed.

It’s the exact same thing.

So no, I don’t want to hear “I wish I could, but I’m just too busy.” Or “I’m too out of shape.” Or “I’m too old.”

No the heck you aren’t. Decide. Commit. Succeed.

I want to see you as a super fit grandma at 92, right there next to me, crushing it at life, knowing you put in the work now to build the habits that let you thrive later.

Thania (TA Content Mgr)

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📈 TheFutureParty delivers the trends shaping business, media, and culture, with insights you can actually use.

💪 These massage balls dig out desk knots like a deep-tissue session.

🛁 Joanna keeps this Salt & Stone body wash stocked, smells incredible.

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👩‍🍳 Recipe of the Week: Herb-Crusted Salmon with Roasted Lemons (thanks to TA reader, Carys F., for sharing!).

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