The Great Immunization Debate: Life Saving Science or Potential Poison? As parents we try to do our best to protect our little ones from the wrongs and dangers of the world. We read all of the baby books, listen to all of the experts, take token pieces of unsolicited advice from strangers and do our best to make the right choices regarding our childrens health and upbringing. So when do these choices affect more than just our children? What if some of the well intended choices we make could affect our community and the health of those around us? How could simple, seemingly well educated decisions pose a threat to not only our precious spawn’s health, but to those we didn’t even know we were protecting in the first place? One of the choices
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Vaccines are an administration, typically in the form of an injection, spray or even an ingestible liquid, of some form of a disease or virus that causes the body to then form antibodies in order to fight off the foreign antigens.
Even though vaccines have come a long way in recent years they are anything but modern medicine. Civilizations have been using forms of immunizations for centuries; in fact there has been evidence of people in the Ottoman Empire using the powdered scabs of people afflicted with smallpox to protect the uninfected in the 1600’s, and that the Chinese were developing and using their own forms of vaccines as early as 200 B.C.
Our current ideas of vaccines come to us through the work of Edward Jenner. In 1796 Jenner found that milkmaids infected with cowpox seem to be immune from smallpox. This observation lead him to then inoculate a child with matter from a blister of a milkmaid infected with cowpox. The young boy fell ill for a short time, but with nowhere near the severity of a typical smallpox infection. Later Jenner again inoculated the same boy with matter from a smallpox blister, and after the child remained healthy he concluded that the human immune response to the cowpox infection could actually spare people from becoming infected with the deadly smallpox virus. (www.historyofvaccines.org/timeline/pioneers) This incredible …show more content…
Their study of 12 children found that 9 of them had developed symptoms of autism after receiving the MMR vaccine, and came to the conclusion that these symptoms were a direct result of the vaccine even though there was no research that definitively proved this link. Recent studies using thousands of subjects have since found that there is no link between vaccines and autism, and furthermore that autism is most likely the effect of genetic factors. Although the scientific community has proven repeatedly that the 1998 article resulted in “scientifically implausible” data, and that Wakefield and most of his fellow researchers were guilty of unethical conduct regarding the study since it was being funded by a law board for some of the patients involved who were engaged in liability legislation against vaccine companies. Wakefield and his coauthors eventually admitted to their bias in choosing candidates for this study, and The Lancet has since issued a retraction. (Calfee, "Junk Science and the Anti-Vaccine Fraud") Even with the mounting evidence against Wakefield's findings the damage caused by the media’s sensationalization of this study has allowed it to still be considered to be the spearhead of the current anti-vaxxing movement.
Vaccines are an administration, typically in the form of an injection, spray or even an ingestible liquid, of some form of a disease or virus that causes the body to then form antibodies in order to fight off the foreign antigens.
Even though vaccines have come a long way in recent years they are anything but modern medicine. Civilizations have been using forms of immunizations for centuries; in fact there has been evidence of people in the Ottoman Empire using the powdered scabs of people afflicted with smallpox to protect the uninfected in the 1600’s, and that the Chinese were developing and using their own forms of vaccines as early as 200 B.C.
Our current ideas of vaccines come to us through the work of Edward Jenner. In 1796 Jenner found that milkmaids infected with cowpox seem to be immune from smallpox. This observation lead him to then inoculate a child with matter from a blister of a milkmaid infected with cowpox. The young boy fell ill for a short time, but with nowhere near the severity of a typical smallpox infection. Later Jenner again inoculated the same boy with matter from a smallpox blister, and after the child remained healthy he concluded that the human immune response to the cowpox infection could actually spare people from becoming infected with the deadly smallpox virus. (www.historyofvaccines.org/timeline/pioneers) This incredible …show more content…
Their study of 12 children found that 9 of them had developed symptoms of autism after receiving the MMR vaccine, and came to the conclusion that these symptoms were a direct result of the vaccine even though there was no research that definitively proved this link. Recent studies using thousands of subjects have since found that there is no link between vaccines and autism, and furthermore that autism is most likely the effect of genetic factors. Although the scientific community has proven repeatedly that the 1998 article resulted in “scientifically implausible” data, and that Wakefield and most of his fellow researchers were guilty of unethical conduct regarding the study since it was being funded by a law board for some of the patients involved who were engaged in liability legislation against vaccine companies. Wakefield and his coauthors eventually admitted to their bias in choosing candidates for this study, and The Lancet has since issued a retraction. (Calfee, "Junk Science and the Anti-Vaccine Fraud") Even with the mounting evidence against Wakefield's findings the damage caused by the media’s sensationalization of this study has allowed it to still be considered to be the spearhead of the current anti-vaxxing movement.