The Importance Of Vaccinations For School Children

Vaccines stimulate the production of antibodies to provide your body against many diseases. “Vaccines … have been proven to be safe, and what happens if you don’t take vaccines is children get measles and die. So the anti-vaccine crowd has … kept measles around in a way … it’s a tragedy, because so much is done to make sure these things are safe” (Oshinsky). Vaccines are developed and manufactured by scientists in order to prevent the population from contracting a disease and/or potentially dying from one. This is currently a controversial topic where people debate whether all children should receive vaccinations or not. There are many reasons why all children should be required to receive specific vaccines before entering a school environment, …show more content…
The requirements included dosage and what vaccinations children received based on what grade level the child is in. They mandated vaccinations for school children because of high death rates from diseases that were prevelant earlier in history. Each vaccine required to enter school has a different dosage and each child should be age-appropriately immunized based on the grade they are in. Age and grade are two important factors of school immunization because different age children are exposed to different potentially dangerous elements in their environment. Children begin receiving vaccines at birth and continue to receive them up to entering and throughout school and also home-schooled children have the same vaccination …show more content…
Researchers look for healthy volunteers to test the vaccines. In phase one, the test can be performed on anywhere between twenty to one hundred volunteers. During this phase, they look for the effectiveness, evaluate any side effects the volunteers may have acquired, and if so determine if the dosage amount was related to the side effect. If phase one is successful researchers move to phase two conducting clinical trials with several hundred volunteers. The two key components in this phase deal with the most common side effects and how the volunteer’s body reacts to the vaccine. In the last phase of the clinical trial, the test is performed on hundreds or thousands of volunteers. What researchers look for in the previous phases continues in this phase as well. In addition they are comparing the subjects who received the vaccine to subjects who did not receive the vaccine. The FDA states, “They will license the vaccine only if its safe and effective and the benefits outweigh the risks. Vaccines are made in batches called lots. Manufactures must test all lots to make sure they are safe, pure, and potent. The lots can only be released once FDA reviews their safety” (“The Journey,”