The Anti-Vaccination Movement

While different types of immunization have been used throughout history, the first vaccine was administered by a country doctor named Edward Jenner in 1796. Ever since that first vaccination, the world has been filled with both pro-vaccination and anti-vaccination movements. Vaccines have helped our society by drastically decreasing the presence of many life threatening diseases like polio, smallpox, and measles, to name a few. Fear and doubt have also surrounded vaccines since their birth. Recently, the anti-vaccination movement has grown in light of one study linking vaccines to autism. While in 2010 the study was refuted in light of flawed evidence, it left many people with the impression that there is more to lose than gain when it comes …show more content…
While I can see how the media has scared an entire group of people into vaccine hesitancy, I know in both my heart and my head that vaccines are the right way to go. When reviewing the pros and the cons, it is obvious to me that their benefits outweigh their risks. Even if there was a link between vaccines and autism, which there isn’t, would you really be so staunchly opposed to caring for an autistic child that you would risk the life of your healthy child in order to avoid that? Not only is this anti-vaccine movement affecting the lives of the children not receiving the care they need, it is affecting those unable to receive the vaccines in the first place. That is what it boils down to for me. I cannot see how someone could be so selfish as to put someone else 's life at risk when it is completely avoidable. Unless there is some monumental discovery about how vaccines are suddenly deadly, I will always be a supporter of …show more content…
Luckily for me, I have parents who also believe in vaccinating their children. I am extremely lucky to be able to have received the proper care that I needed even when I couldn’t make that decision myself. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have parents who are anti-vaccination. Children do not have the ability to make the decision if they should be vaccinated or not. We need stricter guidelines in place to protect these children whose parents make this egregious mistake. I also feel vaccinating our population is important to the entire human race. Herd immunity is nothing to joke about. If enough of our population is vaccinated we are able to protect those who are unable to be vaccinated. When we refuse to inoculate our children, we start putting our whole race in danger. By allowing these diseases to remain in our population, we are giving them the opportunity to mutate and spread. If we continue to refuse the secure data behind vaccines, we can never know what a virus may do