The major news story that broke in 2019 was the story of the young man who, at 18, decided to go against his parent’s wishes and get vaccinated. He was unvaccinated for his entire life up until this point due to his parent’s refusal to allow their children to get the recommended preventative vaccines. After doing his own research, and learning of the dangers, he decided to take his new freedom and make a medical decision on his own and get the vaccines that he had been denied. This sparked a conversation as many more young people came out against their parents and wanted to know if they were able to make their own medical decisions, and if they weren’t, how they could go about getting their parent’s rights stripped so they would be able to be vaccinated.
This is such an important topic in this day and age with the rise of parents who refuse to vaccinate or vaccinate on a schedule that allows their child to be exposed to potential diseases longer than recommended. It is this misuse and abuse of the herd immunity that has kept us safe in the many decades since vaccines started being used that has now seen children being removed from schools and schools seeing large outbreaks of diseases that normally haven’t been seen in such numbers. Herd immunity is the concept that when a majority of a population is immune to a disease, than if a few do not have that immunity, they will remain safe because the disease is no longer active within that population. This is true when only a few individuals are not immune, but when you have large populations, especially ones that are localized in specific areas, the danger of the disease coming back through those individuals becomes even greater.
In the past month, there have been stories of students being removed from schools, excluded from activities, and outbreaks of diseases that spread in rapid succession. In the case of Temple University, a student who traveled overseas contracted the mumps disease and then spread it to others which created a school wide epidemic that affected almost 70 students. While most, if not all, students had previously had the MMR vaccine the immunity had begun to wear off and because of this it left them susceptible to contracting the disease. It was this outbreak that caused many students to get a booster, which is essentially an extra vaccine, to help increase their immunity and help to prevent them from getting the disease. One student who traveled to a country where the MMR vaccine is not commonly used created an epidemic that put their entire student body and the people around them at risk, simply because a disease that is normally not seen was able to find a host and infect those who had weaker immune responses.
While it is understandable that people are wary of vaccines and the safety of their children, it is the continued use of information that has been disproved and heavily discredited that is a major issue that seems to continue daily. It has been disproved that vaccines cause autism in children, as a genetic variation that results in an extra chromosome forming cannot happen once your DNA is already formed and you are no longer in the cellular phases of DNA construction. It has also been proven that vaccines are safe and that side effects are rare, and that vaccines are the only proven way to protect your immune system from these diseases.
The biggest issue that everyone has with this anti-vaxxer movement is the blatant disregard for the safety of other children and those who have weakened immune systems like cancer patients or people with organ transplants. When a child is unvaccinated, they run the risk of giving an infant a disease that can easily kill them, or giving a child who isn’t old enough for the vaccine a disease that could kill them or seriously disable them. Putting a child who is able to carry such deadly and dangerous diseases around others puts not only those in direct contact at risk, but anyone who has secondary contact at risk because bacteria and viruses do not discriminate as long as they can find a viable host.
There are school districts that are allowing children to be unvaccinated because of religious or other beliefs, and that system is sometimes being abused and exploited to satisfy the parent’s desires. It is becoming a commonplace now that schools and districts must be the ones to enact policies regarding students who are vaccinated and their exposure to other young people who they are in charge or ensuring the safety of on a daily basis. The danger that not vaccinating children is going to continue to increase the number of cases of diseases that we haven’t seen in years and may possibly allow for diseases that were previously eradicated, like polio, to resurge and begin affecting major portions of the country as we no longer vaccinate for that and other diseases since they became inactive. Until the federal government makes vaccinations mandatory or allow children of a certain age to begin to determine on their own their decisions on getting vaccines, we are going to constantly be looking over our shoulders and wondering when the next epidemic will hit and if it will affect anyone we know.
The health and safety of the majority is more important than the desires of one, because without the majority, the one cannot survive. It will be interesting to see the changes in the next few years and to see how some of the more influential parents begin to discuss vaccinating their own children. If we can make vaccines desirable again and remind people of why they became important in the first place I think the younger generations will begin to make their own decisions and protect themselves and others by getting vaccinated.
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