Vaccines-They Work!

While vaccines have been considered to be one of the greatest medical breakthroughs in the 20^th century, they have been controversial within the past few decades. For various reasons groups have advocated against vaccines because they feel they are unnatural, or that their children should acquire their immunity to diseases on their own, or that the vaccine is not safe and vaccination could produce an illness. These ideas only get compounded when paper’s such as Andrew Wakefield’s publication linking the MMR vaccine to autism become public and people panic. Despite papers like Wakefield’s being discredited, and respectable organizations such as the Center for Disease Control, The World Health Organization, and others advocating for vaccination, individuals still distrust vaccines.

As a result of misinformation about vaccines, vaccine rates have declined and there were over 1,000 cases of measles in the United States in 2019 alone. Measles was eradicated from the United States in 2001 and there has not been as many cases as this past year since 1992. This means that more and more people are not vaccinating their children which is having a negative impact on these populations, as well as immunocompromised people and infants that can’t receive the vaccine even if they would like to. While the measles may not be killing these people, measles can cause damage to other tissues in the body and lead to secondary infections that can become fatal.

Personally, due to the trends that I am already seeing as a young adult, I am increasingly concerned about the public health status that my potential children could grow up in. If herd immunity for these diseases is broken and people continuously choose to not vaccinate, I am worried about how others will cope. It concerns me that I could potentially not feel safe taking my baby out in public due to the potential of others around me unintentionally harming my child just by the pathogens they carry. I also am uneasy about how legislation will approach anti-vaccination within the coming decades, and how public places like medical facilities, schools, and churches will deal with children and adults who are not vaccinated? As I am learning in this class, it just amazes me how people are unwilling to accept vaccines because of a very minuscule chance that something wrong or abnormal could happen as a result of the vaccine. People would rather their child die or watch them suffer, than potentially giving them a vaccine that might be unnatural, or unsafe when the majority of evidence says otherwise: it just baffles me.