Childhood Vaccinations: Definitely Worth a Shot!

            Doctor visits are never fun, and shots can even be scary for young children. However, childhood vaccinations are essential to ensure that children from all over stay safe from infectious diseases. The benefits of vaccinations far outweigh the "consequences" that anti-vaccinators advocate for.

Childhood Vaccinations: Definitely Worth a Shot!

            

           When we were little, my younger sister used to absolutely hate getting shots. Every time she had to go to the doctor’s office to get a shot, she would cry before we even got to the room. Then when the needle was brought out, she would scream and cry and make a huge deal out of one tiny shot. That is the same reaction that anti-vaccinators have today. They are making way too big of a deal about something that is actually very beneficial. Their arguments against vaccines don’t make a whole lot of sense, and are shrouded in myths and rumors. This is why I believe vaccinations are worth a shot.

            What most people don’t understand is how vaccines actually work. Yoo Jung Kim explains how vaccines work very well in his article. The first vaccine was created by Edward Anthony Jenner after discovering that milkmaids were resistant to smallpox because of the cowpox disease that they caught from the cows. Cowpox and smallpox are very closely related diseases, but cowpox is a lot less deadly than smallpox. When the milkmaids caught the weakened version of the virus, their immune systems learned how to defend themselves from the real virus, and prevented them from getting smallpox.

This is exactly how vaccines work today. When a child is given a shot, he or she is not receiving the actual live virus, but rather a lab-weakened virus that still prompts an immune system response, but does not have the same side effects as the live virus. Since the virus is weakened, this doesn’t mean that the child could still possibly get the disease. It is actually impossible to get a virus from its vaccine. If a child receives a shot and still has symptoms such as a fever, it is because his or her body is having a natural immune response to foreign objects in his or her body. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NAIAID), explains why this happens. Vaccines are simply taking advantage of your natural immune system by causing your body to remember the weakened virus in order to fight off the actual virus when it comes around. Since the body believes it’s actually fighting an infection, a fever may be a mild side effect. In the end, the child’s immune system is simply doing its job.

However, Kim has a theory about why parents are becoming hesitant to vaccinate their children. Kim believes that since we have vaccinated so many people, they have all forgotten about the virulence of the disease, and so have become less tolerant of any and all side effects. Internet and the media have taken over, and projected the fears of a few anti-vaccinators by broadcasting them for everyone to see. This is causing people everywhere to believe that this is all true, when in fact, scientific data can prove it wrong. One of the things people are disagreeing about is whether or not the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism.

            Attorney and writer Michael Snyder wrote an article titled “Vaccines Cause Autism.” He states that one out of every eighty eight children in America have some form of autism. Snyder goes on to say that these children start out developing normally until they are a year or two old, when they begin to behave abnormally. He believes that the cause of this change in their behavior is the vaccinations they are receiving at that age. This is a common misconception among many people today. Andrew Wakefield is the former physician who started the whole ordeal. Wakefield cited five case studies that linked the MMR vaccine to autism in his book Callous Disregard. After his cases were published, people quickly began abandoning vaccinations. However, in January 2011, Wakefield was accused of fraud on the basis that he had paid his subjects to alter their medical histories. There were also accusations that he invoked the MMR scare for his own financial gain. Even though this all happened years ago, people like Snyder still believe that vaccines are harmful. Social media and news coverages have spread this rumor like wildfire, while most scientists remain quiet. So why don’t scientists speak up since they know this rumor is not true? It’s because there are still debates about what actually causes autism. Some people argue that autism is genetic, while others like Wakefield argue that it is caused by environmental factors. All the confusion is coming from the fact that no one actually knows. Autism isn't the only problem concerning vaccines. People like Christina England have done their own research on why they think vaccines are bad.

            Investigative reporter Christina England is an anti-vaccine advocate, and lists many reasons in her article on why not to vaccinate your children. One of the reasons that she lists is because the child is going to get the disease anyway. She references the fact that even children who received the measles vaccine are still getting not only the measles, but very rare cases of measles. She even says that her own child received whooping cough while being fully vaccinated against it. So what is the point of vaccinations if children are just going to get the disease anyway? Why can’t we just stop vaccinating all together and let the body’s natural immunity protect our children? The Center for Disease Control (CDC) takes a look at this very subject.

            One of the diseases they mention in their article is measles. Many people have heard about measles, especially with the recent outbreak in Disneyland, but not many know what the actual disease is. Measles hospitalizes up to 20 percent of those it infects. Seventeen percent of cases have some sort of complication such as diarrhea or pneumonia, the latter of which causes the most measles-related deaths. Before the measles vaccine was introduced, there were 450 measles-related deaths each year between 1953 and 1963. After the vaccine was introduced, the rate of infection dropped by ninety nine percent. If we stopped vaccinating altogether, the death rate would rise to pre-vaccine levels, and 450 people would die each year from a disease that is perfectly preventable by vaccination. Other diseases such as polio and tetanus have become almost nonexistent because we have vaccines for these diseases. 

            Still not convinced? Listen to what the NAIAID have to say. There was a 2005 study that looked at the economic effects of childhood vaccination. They found that for every dollar spent on immunization, the vaccination program saved more than five dollars in direct costs and an additional eleven dollars on costs to the society. This is because it’s cheaper to vaccinate a child than to treat a disease.

            So you save money, so what? Herd immunity is another important factor in preventing diseases. Herd immunity is what happens when large segments of the population are immunized against a disease, and causes the risk of exposure to go down for everyone around, including the unvaccinated. However, if enough people don’t vaccinate their children, even those who previously had the vaccine are at risk to get the disease. The children who were previously vaccinated that end up getting the disease are actually getting a different strain than the other children. This strain is usually rarer and nastier than the original, which is what Christina England was talking about in her article. What she failed to see, however, is that this means that the virus is mutating and learning how to get around the body’s defense system by transforming itself into something else. Vaccinated children become at risk when the ratio of those vaccinated to those not vaccinated dips below a certain percentage. In the United States, this is a vaccination rate of 92%-94% for measles. The reason that we are beginning to see measles outbreaks again is because in seven states and Washington D.C. the vaccination rate was below 90%. In the Disneyland outbreak alone, there were 99 cases of measles, and reports that it spread to 13 other states. Measles has a 90% infection rate, so if it comes into your area and you’re not vaccinated, you will more than likely end up with the disease. So what’s the moral of this morbid story? Vaccinate your children.

            Even though vaccines have gathered a bad reputation recently, people tend not to think

 about all the good they have done for us. In a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, mostly young and uneducated people thought that the MMR vaccine was unsafe. 

            
            Since all these terrible diseases have been silenced by vaccines, the general public seems to have forgotten all the harmful effects that come with these diseases. The bottom line is this. Vaccines are perfectly safe for everyone, and will neither cause disease, autism, nor weaken the immune system. Instead, it will provide immunity from these diseases that is lifesaving, and there are no consequences at all. What can it hurt, then, to give your child the best chance at life that they could ever get?