 that's a very short a lot of girl in a few years for us and so let me tell you a little bit about how she got sick it was very normal I mean it was routine we're young parents with young family and she just came home and and was a little bit tired so we took her to the pediatrician I think this is a Thursday and pediatrician did nasal swab and said okay she's got flu and we said okay what do we do and she said well she's gonna be able you know this flu is you get pretty sick so don't expect her just to pop up in a couple days she'll run fevers and and you know feel bad and kind of get you know be lethargic and low energy and here's what you have to watch out for and so we went home and thought man that's inconvenient you know we're kind of busy right now who has time to have someone down with the flu and so through the weekend she that's exactly what we saw we saw her up you know you saw her on the couch with her brother and she'd be watching cartoons then she would be tired and running more of a high fever and then so it was kind of like this and on Sunday always on weekends with kids right she seemed like she was worse and this was Super Bowl Sunday and in a mid-afternoon we kind of said you know she looks kind of puny and we ended up calling saying well should we take her in you know should we not if we go no no one's open we'll have to go to the emergency room this was a little bit before there was a free-sing emergency department on every single corner that you turned on so you know that was the regular emergency department that was a long long wait that was what we would have to do we call her pediatrician took a while to call back and by then she was looking good again and the pediatrician said well you know from what you told me just watch and once you bring her in Monday so bring her in tomorrow and we'll take a look at her and if there's anything that needs to be done we'll do it so he said okay that night it she was it was a tough night for her she you know she was throwing up just you know more of a fever just seems sicker overall so I kind of felt you know I didn't get a ton of sleep my wife was pregnant that very very pregnant do you know within you know a week or so with our fourth child so I stayed home from work because my wife could not carry Emily being pregnant to go the doctor and in the morning gave her a shower she kind of laid on the bed and watched cartoons and around probably 10 30 or so I heard my wife start screaming upstairs and what happened is Emily was laying in our bed in our room and kind of on her side and my wife had gone into sometimes when you look and you just feel their back and she found that she had stopped breathing and we didn't know how long I mean it could have been moments it could have been you know it couldn't have been very long because we'd been in and out of the room so we did CPR and called the paramedics right away and they got there it's a lot of that is a blur you know there's just a few kind of sharp memories that I have but I do remember my son Andrew coming in and watching all this and I remember him asking if she was going to die so that started a really long day for us where we went to the emergency department they were able to get her heart started again we were transferred to the children's hospital and then it was just a full-on swarm of it was you know 20 people in her room doing everything that they could when I look back now and we had hope I mean we were hopeful when when they got her heart started again we were like okay good we're moving the right direction you know we're gonna you know this is gonna turn out okay but looking back I see the clues in how the medical team talked to us about things and anyway around later that night probably was about 10 30 so we had a you know we were there all day friends started coming in family started coming in but the doctor came to me he said hey he pulled me aside he said we've reached the limit you know everything we've done we can't put any more drugs into her and we can't see any activity there's no brain activity you know what do you want us to do and we started talking about this and I don't know why he picked me but maybe I was like the person that he felt he could talk to and then my wife and I started talking about this and we ultimately we agreed that you know it was time to say goodbye and so we did this is one of very few things that I would run into my house in a fire to save because this is a cast about about a week after we lost Emily we got a box from the hospital and they had taken this cast of her hand and if you look at it you can actually see that there you know some of the medical tape is on there it's just it's weird the things that make such a difference to you I think so after after we lost Emily probably what seemed like it was terrible timing but was a very good thing for us was our daughter was born 13 days later and when you can't wallow in your own pity and you have somebody else to focus on other than yourself it turns out to be a very good thing having responsibility you can't curl up in a ball and just avoid things and she helped our entire family I think heal and she was her own person very different very smart and mischievous very protected by our family and so we spent I think those that time of healing for us you know she really really helped us get through that three months you know four months but in my head I was burning with this question of initially I thought okay when we get her autopsy back they're gonna tell me that she had something wrong that cancer or something that we didn't know about that would allow influenza to kill her because I just you know I couldn't compute that it didn't make sense to me and what she was perfectly healthy and when we got the results back and I started you know this was the thing that I just started I couldn't let it go because you know I just couldn't wrap my head around the fact that you know we lost our daughter how could this thing you know have taken her that we were ill-prepared for that we didn't know about and so during this time period I had started really I started talking to physicians I you know would I brought all her medical record and I would go to infectious disease doctors at children's hospitals I started talking to I would read papers from researchers and then I'd call them up and it's how I met some people at the CDC who I'll say as an aside for busy busy people I certainly they gave a lot of attention and very long emails to just a dad calling about the blue about this so some really good people there so we embarked and we started in 2005 we we started an organization with other parents called families fighting flu because after about four or five months we realized that the thing that we could have done was to make sure she was vaccinated that that was the thing that we could have done as parents that we did not do that probably would have saved her life for those of you that have been around this you know in immunization and policy and things like that for a long time we really focused in the early years in 2005 once we got some structure in our organization we focused on kids so the year that my daughter died 2003 2004 that flu season there was a lot of children that died about a hundred over 150 died and that changed a lot of things it started started a wave of reporting pediatric deaths so I think they around the country and as a requirement but at the time Emily was three and vaccine flu vaccine was only recommended for children who were immune compromised or sick or who are between the ages of six months and two years old so that's all the recommendation covered for pediatrics so a lot of what we focused on was universal vaccination in the early years and so we you know this was vaccinate your kids to protect them okay to parents I did countless interviews we we started raising money we started partnering to do at different kinds of education programs but the message was do this to protect your children so that what happened to Emily doesn't happen to your child very simple it's like a suit of armor and we did a lot of different things and so we we were fortunate to we were I think lucky that we were able to raise a fairly significant amount of money we were fortunate in the kinds of partners that we met as we started to work and different members worked around the country the different kinds of programs and I mean we've tried everything there were there's a race car a NAS car painted with a thing we did with Clorox back eight years ago I mean we still will we'll try anything and if we think it'll make a difference and our unfortunately our organization grew we're over 35 families now and I've probably talked to a hundred other parents who have lost children to flu who for one reason or another advocacy is not for them you know it's so we worked a little bit in Texas and I and I will say that we you know over the years again because this has been a long journey that once we had universal flu recommendations the challenge is getting parents to actually do it and so our role the role we try to play is in kind of being the message bears being someone that can help get attention that can kind of okay that's gonna prompt the parent to make sure they have the discussion with their health care provider or go in or it's busy during this time of year and teenagers are running all over the place make sure they get in so education education so in 2007 our daughter who you met Ali was diagnosed with cancer and she didn't get the terrible terrible go straight to bone marrow transplant cancer but she didn't get the 95 very sort of routine past she was Jed leukemia and this was a tough time for us but I remember when we got the diagnosis and what happens in cancer which a lot of people don't with at least with kids is I always thought that well if something like that happened being who I am I will go on the Internet I will spend 400 hours talking to all my friends and researching and figuring out who has the very best outcomes for what I'm doing and then I will go there so if that's MD Anderson if that's st. Jude's you know that's how I thought about it but how it actually works is a little different in that in her case and in a lot of kids when they diagnose them part of the diagnosis for leukemia is opening up and doing a spinal tap and when they do that they need to put chemotherapy on there so you're right there the outcomes are better if they immediately treat so we were sort of thrown into this but the oncologist said to my wife and I he said you're strangely calm about this and we said well the worst things already happened to us and we lost a daughter in this hospital this we feel like we can do something about so we're optimistic it's not the worst thing that happened to us and she went through a very I mean I I don't know when I don't want to spend too much time on on cancer but it was 17 months of constant chemotherapy lots of hospitalizations we probably drove 6,000 miles a year back and forth to the hospital you can see how fat she would become when she had steroids I mean they would just 40% of her body weight she would go up and then she'd go rail thin you know in the in the very next cycle so the this is happening each phase going and there's no breaks there's no breaks in the beginning so it's constant constant constant and she had what they call a double path because she failed induction therapy so she had a double strength chemo path that the that the evidence showed that she needed to have she had shingles for six months during that treatment wouldn't go away kidney stones you name it there's tons of things as an example I asked the hospital to look up her medical record and I said we've seen so many people so many people have cared for her how many people did it take to get one kid better luckily they did this I'm kind of active in the hospital I don't know that they would do the work for a lot of people it turned out that it was over 260 nurses and physicians and caregivers that she had in her medical record there over over I think it was just just less than three years that's how many that's shocking now it's not so shocking to me but it may be shocking to some of you to think that's how many people had to touch one patient a cancer patient to to actually get her through that journey so cancer for us and I'll I'll let you know that we got very lucky and this is my daughter today or recently that she is she's in a magnet program she's a very good athlete volleyball player plays on a on a kind of highly ranked club so we got lucky and we got in so far we we didn't have any of the heart effects we didn't have some of that there's a chemo carries a huge burden for children and and we dodged all of those but one of the things that happened to us in the very beginning of treatment she had to be isolated she was at home she was a little but after you get through that first year they're saying okay you got to get them back in school you can't keep them in a bubble they have to you know they have to live their lives and so we were faced with this challenge I mean I back when she was immune compromised I could if someone coughed a mile away I you know I could zone right to someone sneezing or coughing I mean you're that sensitive to what's going on if we went to a restaurant we brought Clorox and we wiped everything down on there one time we had to take a plane ride and we brought sheets and we decked the whole thing you know covered up I mean you just don't want everything is like danger danger and so we were faced with when she had to go back to school all of a sudden we were going into preschool and because of our work with influenza we started talking to people and finding out well gosh people there are people that don't vaccinate their kids and you would read about oh there's a measles outbreak in Washington State or somewhere and it was always around kids that weren't vaccinated so flu flu flu all about flu for us but in our case we started as we put her back in school and I ended up having to go down and testify in Austin as they were talking about health care practitioners because there was a bill wasn't too many years ago that they were passing legislation in Texas that would require hospital and health care workers all to get flu vaccination thank you this wasn't in our institution where we were they were already doing that so my daughter before they were required it was you know pretty clear and certainly absolutely required in on oncology on fifth floor where we were so I went down in support of that but but as we were putting her in school we reached out to the principal we said hey we know you can't tell us who but can you do us a favor can you make sure that if we have parents that kids aren't vaccinated and you know who they are can you please not put Ali in class with them you know how do we you know you don't know who the friends are I don't ask my friends whether they vaccinate their kids I don't choose my children's friends based on the answer that some parents provide about whether they're fully vaccinated so that really that really struck a chord with us that that our daughter was vulnerable that we couldn't vaccinate her as it turned out when she was done with chemotherapy we had to actually vaccinate her over again for many things so we when they did the titers they found that the chemotherapy had kind of knocked some of the she wasn't at the therapeutic level of titers on some of her vaccines so she ended up getting a revaccinated on a few of them and fully brought to speed but when she couldn't be you know we were in this position of wait a second we're now part of that group that depends on everybody else doing what they're supposed to doing all the other parents protecting their kids and it was scary and it's scary to me when I think about other other parents out there of kids who are maybe it's cancer or something else and you see some stats in certain places around our state where you know certain schools have very high rates of unvaccinated people it's scary one of the things that's always bothered me about doing this is that and maybe this is something that y'all you're on the front lines here it is are you making a difference you know we've always wondered we've seen at least with with influenza vaccination rates we've seen those kind of creep up around the country at mostly because of access and recommendations but we hope a little bit because we're out there with the message and we have people and people like you are directly talking and educating and in 2015 this is the first time I saw something and this was published in vaccine magazine and there was some data on influenza vaccination and what that I'll bottom line it for you because some of you may have already read this article but the bottom line is that when you look at these I think nine seasons that they estimated that that vaccination had saved over 320 children's lives and this was the first time I saw something like this that they actually had the data that could empirically show that these are the number of lives that our vaccine program saved and we're talking about maybe 70% I think is it really when we get to 70% of the total population in flu that's a really successful I don't I don't know that I've seen north of that ever but here's the opportunity in Texas so that so that's that's some of the good information but when you look at the last nine seasons in Texas this is from dishes data we've lost 145 kids to influenza 145 in Texas so clearly you know that's 18 a year and there's and I think the low year in there was eight so I've never had the thing that I want to see which is how do we get how do we get to zero can we get to zero or how do we get to a hundred percent of all the children vaccinated in Texas this really bothers me it's something that you know if I on one day look and we say wow we're doing great we've saved lives what we do is meaningful and then on the other day it's gosh this is like trying to boil the ocean you know there's you know it's every time you do whack-a-mole and you knock something down then something pops up and it's a little bit crazy I do have a couple of ideas I do think parents are the key I do think that flu is a little bit harder maybe because there's some you know it's you have to do it every year maybe some has to do with the timing one of the things that you need to do is that I've noticed that people parents are not always scared of the things they should be scared about so for example I don't know if you have this in your area but we have lots of crazy clown sightings now this phobia that's going around America in Dallas we had everybody remembers Ebola and you wouldn't believe the depths what people would go to with Ebola how frightened they were of Ebola of schools closing and all these kinds of things but we have a hundred and we've we've lost a hundred and forty five children to flu over nine years and if we would simply you know if it would get as much coverage as these stupid clowns running around the country now they are scary by that by that I actually don't like clowns that much I'm gonna change that so but but these clowns aren't doing anything they're just running around so a couple of ideas that I have and I want to kind of I want to leave with with a few things that I've been thinking about number one I think maybe we could move the needle further if we tied flu vaccination to somehow to participation in UIL sports so I've been thinking about this for a while I haven't I haven't really started anything or approached any lawmakers about this but you know we as my kids have played and I'm sure many other you know parents here have had children that play sports or banned or something else that's governed under UIL we have huge participation in Texas and athletics you already require them to have a visit where they go and they have to get certified I think we there's some things in there about concussion protocols now would rightfully so I think there's some things about sudden cardiac death certain things that are in that so why not put flu vaccination in the requirement the timings kind of right you know maybe not perfect because of when vaccines available so there are some challenges but that's one idea and I wonder if that could get us another 10% maybe you maybe you'll get us 10% maybe you'll get us 12% I don't know another thing I've thought about I work for a hospital system and everywhere I drive all there's so many billboards and I am in DFWA there's every there's hospital billboards everywhere and I wonder if maybe in October and we could do this everywhere I'm sure we could get the Texas Hospital Association to at least think about this would all the hospitals change their billboard at the same time so imagine however number I don't know the number of billboards maybe there's a 2000 that hospital zone would they all change to the same one that talks about flu season flu vaccination protect Texas I whatever it is you know smart people will come up with what you know what that the messaging should be or something compelling but the fact is to me it's the number of impressions that you get because I think flu vaccination is one of those things to where as I talked to parents we've never ever really worried too much about you know the fraction of a percent that under no circumstances whatsoever will ever get their kid a flu shot because they're adamantly opposed to it or they're opposed to the government telling them what to do whatever that's just a tiny bit you know when we talk to parents for the most part it's about it's one of two things it's either I'm busy I would probably do it but I'm running around and I'm doing here and I'm taking my kids to this you know for sporting events and schools doing this and or I'm a single dad or I'm a single mother and I'm and it's time or it's influenza the flu well you know why do I worry about that that's no big deal they have no idea how many people die from influenza every year they just don't and that's how I used to be I think of you know before losing my daughter that was we were naive we were we were right in that group I would my my kids they would wear their seat belts they would wear their life jackets we would get them out of the pool this gets me we I've never heard of anyone maybe that it happens I need to really really research this but how many people have been killed in a pool struck by lightning I don't know but I get my kids out of the water when there's lighting you know and even that I don't know what that risk is so I think that those two things you know that education that flu is important enough of a threat to protect your kids and that seeing the message the reminders enough reminders if you see it 50 times and it's in that moment when there's vaccine eventually you'll go okay I got to do that you know it maybe for some people it takes 10 times some people it takes 20 times so those are those are two I I don't know if they're great ideas I don't know if they're bad ideas they're just my ideas about how maybe we can move the needle a little bit further on flu vaccination I want to close with a few comments that I think in 2005 the first interview that I did was we did it my wife and I did an interview with Diane Sawyer on flu I've probably done hundreds and hundreds you know since then one of the other things that I learned about this so is I never knew how many people were working at the grassroots level in public health departments and collaboratives in different kinds of community efforts I've been in I don't know maybe a dozen states we're at the state level or at a county level or some sort of amalgamation and I had no idea that it took that many dedicated people to to protect our kids I mean literally thousands so I know that a lot of people don't know or and probably don't appreciate how important the work is that all of y'all do but I do I didn't before but I know that it's it's probably somewhat thankless I don't know that there's a lot of badges or heroes or rewards I don't suppose that I'm gonna guess that you know on show and tell day you know it's it's easier to be the firefighter or something fun and cool than it is to you know bring mom and or dad and say what do they do well we help kids get immunized or we work here we work at this thing but I think that vaccines are maybe one of the biggest home runs that we've ever had in public health and as we I worry about losing that a little bit and it's not obvious and it's not easy and it's it's lots of little conversations with people that don't know about it or are concerned or have barriers or whether they're driving or economic or access I mean these are all things that we need to continue to make sure that our population is protected so I want to say thank you that I'm at least one person including everybody here but who's sort of not in this space does really appreciate all the hard work that every one of y'all does and it makes a difference and there's not a lot of studies that show that but it does say I'm convinced that it saves lives a lot of lives so thank you very much I'll answer I think I'm a little early so I'll answer some questions if there are any or out there but thank you for having me have a good conference