Should Children Be Mandatory Essay

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Childhood vaccinations should be mandatory. It should not be a parent’s choice whether or not to vaccinate their child and put not only them but others around them at risk. If we don’t vaccinate our children at the recommended time, then we are risking them catching a disease that that could carry very bad consequences. Throughout the years there have been numerous outbreaks of diseases that have taken tons of lives. This could have been totally prevented or considerably less severe if more people had been vaccinated, simply because the diseases would not have kept spreading. Through the development of vaccinations, parents have been given a chance to protect their children as well as those around them and to develop immunity to diseases before …show more content…
But the truth is parents who choose to not vaccinate their children might be jeopardizing the health of other people’s children who cannot get the vaccinations because they are too young or for other reasons (The Huffington Post). So yes it is other people’s business. Parents wonder why they should vaccinate for diseases we may never encounter, but here are the reasons why we need to continue the vaccines. Most vaccine preventable disease is spread from one person to another person, right? So, when one person in a community catches an infectious disease, that person can spread the disease to others who aren’t immune to it. But if a person is immune to the disease because they were vaccinated, then they cannot catch the disease and spread it around to others which prevents an epidemic. Whereas if a person catches a disease in a community where people haven’t been vaccinated against the disease, it can spread like wildfire and cause an epidemic (American Academy of Pediatrics). Smallpox is the only disease that has been totally erased from the planet, which is a disease that children are vaccinated for. Society never hears of Polio in the U.S. but it is still occurring in many African countries. There were over thirty thousand cases of measles reported around the world in 2011, …show more content…
As a result, parents think that children should not be given the MMR vaccine, but they don’t understand and research the reality of the symptoms’ occurrence time. When they choose not to vaccinate their children because of a simple misunderstanding, it effects many people other than their children. Other diseases like sickle cell can be linked to genetics but although autism is somewhat linked to genetics, vaccines are the easy blame but it is wrong (Mnookin,Seth). Scientists say correlation simply doesn’t imply causation, despite the assumption that so many parents make. It is similar to when a person becomes sick and assumes the last thing they have eaten is what made them sick. A person automatically tries to link a cause to a problem even if it isn’t the correct one. Besides the fear of learning disabilities such as autism, most parents say that their reason for refusing to vaccinate their children is because of safety concerns, pain, fever, and too many vaccines in one visit because a child can receive up to 23 vaccines by the time they are two years old and as many as six of them at one visit (American Academy of

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