'Nova': Take that, Jenny McCarthy

* NOVA: VACCINES - CALLING THE SHOTS. 10 tonight, WHYY12.

"NOVA" isn't usually a destination for the science-phobic or medically wary.

But tonight on "Vaccines - Calling the Shots," the 40-year-old PBS series isn't just preaching to the choir. It's also trying to speak to those whose reluctance to vaccinate their children has helped fuel a resurgence in diseases like measles and whooping cough.

And it's willing to resort to that staple of Facebook - videos of adorable babies - to do it.

In this case, the adorable baby is 7-week-old Osman Chandab, who's shown, not so adorably, struggling for every breath in a Melbourne, Australia, hospital as his distraught mother looks on.

Osman, we're told, was due for his pertussis (whooping cough) shot in another week. His early exposure could be linked to an increase of the disease in developed countries where widespread vaccination had once made it rare.

Osman isn't alone: According to "Nova," the U.S. had nearly 50,000 cases of whooping cough in 2012 and 20 deaths.

Some 10 percent of parents reportedly delay or skip one or more of their children's recommended shots and about 1 percent don't vaccinate at all, but the numbers are far higher in some places, where lack of "herd immunity" could threaten those too young or frail to be immunized.

You won't hear about Jenny McCarthy in "Calling the Shots," which nevertheless goes to considerable lengths to acknowledge the concerns of parents that she and others may have influenced.

"There's just so much information there, and I don't know who to ask. There's no such thing as an unbiased source," complains one California mother, who delayed her daughter's vaccinations until she was 3. She has, she says, "a lot of friends who don't vaccinate at all and if you say 'vaccine' around them, then they look at you like you are literally - well, you know - like you are poisoning your child."

One friend stopped vaccinating after her child had a seizure. Another complains that no one will discuss possible reactions: "I would really like to know what the real risks are."

I hope she's watching, because "Calling the Shots" does a first-rate job of acknowledging those risks and then putting them in perspective, respectfully, for people who are too young to remember diseases like measles or whooping cough, or who may still have lingering doubts about what's proven to be a nonexistent link between autism and certain vaccinations.

"I guess we all have our biases. Mine is that I work in a hospital," says Dr. Paul Offit, of the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, recalling the "massive measles epidemic" in Philadelphia in 1991, in which seven of the nine who died were patients at CHOP.

"We had to stand by and watch while we tried to support them. . . . It gets to you," he says.

Of the pattern where diseases continually re-emerge as vaccination rates drop, Offit, co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, says, "It's a history that we don't seem to learn from."

For the majority already onboard with vaccines, the history of vaccination itself might prove unexpectedly fascinating.

Maybe you knew that people were being inoculated for smallpox hundreds of years before Edward Jenner introduced his cowpox version in the 1790s, or that 70 years before Jenner, a Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had brought a Turkish practice home to Britain with her. I hadn't.

"Calling the Shots" is occasionally heavy-handed. I could have done without the painstaking re-creation of a young, unvaccinated Orthodox Jewish man triggering a measles outbreak in his Brooklyn neighborhood. Or the interview with the mother of a 37-year-old victim of cervical cancer, juxtaposed with another mother who doesn't want her young daughter inoculated against HPV.

But when up against those who traffic mostly in misinformation and emotion, even "Nova" may need to appeal to hearts as well as minds.

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