Pros Of Vaccines

To refuse vaccines is to not fear death and disease. A growing number of people have been refusing immunization for their children and themselves because they are afraid of possible harm. They do not realize that vaccines has prevented disease worldwide. Vaccines have more benefits than risks because they eliminate and significantly prevent disease and their risks are often exaggerated or false. Due to vaccines, the amount of cases and deaths caused by disease have drastically decreased. In 1988, cases of polio were greater than 350,000, but the introduction of its vaccine allowed the amount to decrease to 187 in 2012 (“Vaccination Programs”). Factors like improved health care and hygiene have contributed to the decrease. However, vaccination …show more content…
Polio has been “virtually eliminated” in this country because of vaccines and efforts to globally eradicate polio (“Vaccination Programs”). Without vaccines, this could not be possible because polio is a highly contagious virus. Nearly everyone caught polio at least once before a vaccine was introduced for it. Due to vaccines, incidence of polio cases have dropped considerably low globally. Diphtheria is another disease that has basically disappeared in our country as well. Diphtheria was once a very common disease to catch, but now it is extremely rare to catch. Even though some diseases are very uncommon, there are still traces of disease …show more content…
In example, immunization levels dropping in the United Kingdom during the 1970s resulted in “more than 100,000 cases and 36 deaths due to pertussis” (“Vaccination Programs”). Concerns of the safety of the old pertussis vaccine had caused this drop in vaccinations. These doubts and concerns had terrible and irreversible consequences, but they taught the UK that they cannot risk to repeat this mistake again. Unfortunately, Japan had a very similar situation. Immunization coverage for pertussis has fell down 60 percent in just five years after 1974. The drop in vaccination resulted in an epidemic involving “more than 13,000 cases and 41 deaths” (“Vaccination Programs”). Even in these highly developed countries, outbreaks of disease were inevitable when people had stopped vaccinating themselves. Many diseases are highly contagious or very easily caught, such as measles. There is a 90 percent chance that a person left unvaccinated would catch the measles if it were apparent in their environment (“Vaccination Programs”). The U.S. does not experience that many cases of measles because generations before now have been vaccinated. However, if we were to stop vaccinating, the chance of outbreak would be very likely because many diseases are highly contagious. The reason for decreasing immunization rates are due to people refusing vaccines because they think that they contain harmful