You're sitting at the dog park watching your new puppy chase the other bigger dogs around. You laugh and take videos of him because he is so much slower than the others. Then all of a sudden a huge dog with rabies comes out of the woods. The big dogs run away and leave your little puppy all alone. They don't try to protect him when he can't protect himself and there is nothing you can do, nothing your puppy could do, because after all, he is just a puppy. Your poor puppy gets bitten by the dog and now has rabies himself and dies. 

This type of thing, sadly, is happening with children as well. Children, who can't protect themselves, are being infected with diseases that are vaccine preventable. One case is a month old baby who had whooping cough, a disease thought of as extinct (Libster). This baby wasn't old enough to get the vaccination for the disease and those who she was exposed to didn't have a status of herd immunity to protect her. After being admitted to the hospital, three days later she passed away (Libster). This baby should not have died from whooping cough. To prevent more innocent deaths such as this one, those people who aren't being vaccinated, aren't having their children vaccinated, need to learn about vaccinations to know the true value of them so that those who are against vaccinations are swayed to the pro-vaccine side to protect those who can't protect themselves.

So what exactly are vaccines and vaccinations? Vaccines are the weakened or dead diseases which causes your body to become immune to it and a vaccination is the actual injection of the vaccine into your body. Before they were invented, there were many outbreaks of different diseases. In 1721, there was a smallpox epidemic that killed hundreds of people. In 1861, a measles outbreak occurred among the soldiers of the Civil War. In 1862, an outbreak in a smallpox hospital killed 110 patients in one week (The History of Vaccines). The disease spread quickly and was hard to take care of. In 1878, over thirteen thousand people were killed by Yellow Fever in Mississippi Valley. In 1894, the United States had its first polio outbreak, a disease of the nervous system. It consisted of eighteen deaths and 132 people becoming paralyzed permanently (The History of Vaccines). At the time, not only did they not have a vaccination for the disease, they didn't know it was a contagious disease so they weren't careful about being around people with it. 

In 1916, there was a measles outbreak killing almost 12,000 people in which seventy-five percent of the cases were under five years of age (The History of Vaccines). These children couldn't protect themselves and they had weak immune systems. They didn't have the vaccination at the time, but if they had, these babies would have been too young to get them and they would have had to rely on herd immunity. In 1918, there was a flu epidemic that killed fifty million people. In 1934, there were more than 260,000 cases of whooping cough. In 1952, there were 57,628 cases of polio and 21,000 of them caused the people to become paralyzed (The History of Vaccines). In 1956 there was a polio epidemic in Argentina that killed thousands of people and left thousands of people with neurological damage (Libster). In 1964, there was a Rubella outbreak. Rubella can affect unborn babies severely if pregnant women get the disease and that is what happened with this outbreak. Almost fifty thousand pregnancies were infected with Rubella. This created thousands of miscarriages, eight thousand babies born deaf, 3,500 born deaf and blind, and twenty thousand cases of congenital Rubella syndrome (The History of Vaccines). 

There are vaccinations for all of these diseases that were causing these horrible outbreaks and deaths. The first vaccination was introduced into the United States in 1802, the smallpox vaccination. In 1855 Massachusetts was the first state to pass a law mandating that all children who are going to attend school had to be vaccinated. This would make it to where all children, whether they supported vaccinations or not, were required to get vaccinated or they could not attend school. In 1945, the influenza vaccine was introduced and approved for military use and then in 1946 it was approved for the use on civilians. In 1963 the measles vaccine was licensed and in 1969 the rubella vaccine was licensed. Then in 1971, the measles and rubella became one vaccination called the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) that all children were required to get. In 1976 the swine flu vaccine was created. In 1977 the Pneumococcal vaccine was licensed, protecting against fourteen types, and in 2000 the vaccine was licensed for use on children. In 1995 the Hepatitis A vaccine was licensed and in 2006 the vaccine was licensed for children. These vaccinations, for the most part, are all suggested to get as soon as you can so you can protect yourself against them. After all of these vaccinations were introduced to people, the rate of outbreaks of these diseases decreased majorly. Vaccines have caused smallpox, whooping cough, measles, polio, yellow fever, rubella and many other diseases to either become extinct or nearly extinct.  

Vaccinations are beneficial to receive. When children receive vaccinations, they have 90-100 percentage rate of creating immunity to the disease (Vaccines are Effective). This is a high percentage that the vaccination will do what it is made for and protect your child. They are also beneficial because they not only protect yourself, but they also help protect those who are not able to get them. Receiving vaccinations can help yourself in one of two different ways. Vaccinations either cause your body to become immune to the disease so you won't get it if you come in contact with the disease or if you do get the disease, it will be a milder case instead of full blown. This is because the vaccination causes your body to quickly recognize the disease and know how to defeat it. Receiving vaccinations help others because of a concept called herd immunity. Herd immunity is when a community or group of people have enough people vaccinated that if one person does get the disease, an outbreak won't occur because most people are vaccinated (Salathe). 

There are people who rely on herd immunity to protect them so they don't get sick. Children who are too young to get vaccinated yet or people with compromised immune systems that don't allow them to receive vaccinations rely on the herd immunity. They need high herd immunity so that they will have a very slim chance of contracting the disease. 

Even though there is evidence that vaccinations have eliminated diseases, caused outbreaks to decrease and help tremendously, there are people who have religious beliefs or philosophical beliefs against vaccinations that cause them not to receive them. It's okay to have a couple people who have true religious or philosophical reasons not to get vaccinations because then we still have herd immunity with only a select few not being vaccinated. Lately though, there have been more and more parents and others making up excuses not the be vaccinated just because they don't want to take the time to get vaccinated (Ciolli). This is causing more outbreaks to occur because they are lowering herd immunity. There are also people who believe misconceptions about vaccinations that cause them to be against them. A huge misconception, which is considered a philosophical reason, about vaccinations is that they cause autism. A woman named Cathy Jameson believes that her son received autism from a vaccination shot he had when he was younger (Jameson). She has no bases for her argument other than the fact the vaccination and the autism diagnosis were around the same time. She also believes that the government knows about this "link" and have been covering it up to protect the vaccination producers (Jameson). Then yet again, she has no evidence. She wants to be able to place the blame on someone or something for her son having autism and vaccinations got caught in the middle. Her and other people believing this link to be true have made their opinions greatly known and have caused more people to become skeptical of vaccinations. 

This belief of some cases of autism being caused by vaccinations is due to a substance named thimerosal, which is a mercury found in vaccinations (Autism and Vaccines-Topic Overview). Many studies have been done on this claim and there has been no scientific evidence found that thimerosal causes autism (Salathe). Scientists have done many trials testing this theory, but have never found any correlation between the two. In fact, the vaccine companies have taken thimerosal out of vaccinations, leaving only trace amounts, but the amount of children being diagnosed with autism has still been increasing over the years (Gorski). Even though this claim has been disproven countless times, parents still have this fear about their children getting autism from a vaccine. This is because they don't know about the studies done and haven't done the research on it themselves. 

Others say that if you don't want to have your kids vaccinated, then that is okay. They propose that signs should be posted at daycares, schools, towns, etc. (Makielski). Signs consisting of green, yellow, or red. Green represents that this area has high herd immunity, yellow represents herd immunity is okay, but be cautious, and red represents that if you can't receive vaccinations, do not come here (Makielski). This would leave it up to the parents and the older people who can't have the vaccinations to protect themselves by avoiding those areas. It would mean that people would have to share their personal medical records about their vaccination history so that these signs would be able to be posted. Theoretically, this sounds like a good idea and sounds like it would work, but what if the person with the compromised immune system has to go to that specific hospital, this specific job office because they are really need there or that specific town because that is where they have to vote for the election. There is no way to absolutely avoid every low herd immunity area if you need to. Also, do you really want to have to share your medical records with strangers so they can have the signs posted?  

So the question is, whose responsibility is it to protect those who can't protect themselves? Is it the responsibility of the parents to make sure their kids are vaccinated to help herd immunity or to keep their kids away from areas of low herd immunity if they have a compromised immune system? Is it the responsibility of everyone else to protect those who can't get vaccinated? In reality, it's the responsibility of both the parents and everyone else. Parents need to make sure that if their kids can get vaccinated, that they do. Everyone else needs to be mindful and think about those who can't protect themselves and get themselves vaccinated as well. Parents and everyone else need to stop making excuses to why they don't want their children or themselves vaccinated so that they can help save lives of innocent people. 

The herd immunity status has been decreasing because of the parents and others who have been making the outrageous religious or philosophical beliefs against vaccinations so they wouldn't have to vaccinate their children or themselves. People who have never had these beliefs before are all of a sudden having them and not receiving vaccinations. This is causing diseases that were thought of to be extinct, to start coming back. History is beginning to repeat itself. There were three major outbreaks of diseases after their vaccinations were created just because the people didn't get their vaccinations. In 1925, there was an outbreak of smallpox in Milwaukee. Out of the 386 cases, 87 people died, and 327 people had never been vaccinated (The History of Vaccines). In 1989 there was an outbreak of measles killing 123 people (The History of Vaccines). My older sister was born in 1989. Thankfully my mom had her vaccinated so that she wouldn't contract the nasty disease and possible die. And in 2008, there was yet another measles outbreak because in more than 90% cases, the people had been vaccinated (The History of Vaccines). If people would have gotten their children vaccinated, these outbreaks could have been stopped and prevented. If they would have gotten their children vaccinated, they could have saved the lives of innocent children.

Yet still, there have been multiple outbreaks over the past few years. One big outbreak occurred in Disneyland of the measles. A survey was done on parents not too long before the outbreak occurred and whether they supported vaccinations or not. The survey showed that a lot of the parents said they did support them, but a lot also said they didn't (Norton). At first the survey sounds like it had positive results, people supporting vaccinations, but almost just as many parents didn't support vaccinations as those that did. Then the outbreak occurred. When parents were finding out about it or had their children affected by it, the survey was done again on the same parents. Almost all of those parents who didn't support vaccinations said that they now did (Norton). This survey had much more positive results because there weren't nearly as many people against vaccinations anymore. It took having to see the effects of an outbreak to sway these parents into supporting vaccinations. It should never have to go that far, where it takes thousands of kids getting sick or dying to get support for vaccinations. 

Parents shouldn't have to see these effects first hand to support vaccinations. They should be taught about what vaccinations are, about their safety, how they are tested and shown evidence of these past outbreaks so that it doesn't have to take a new outbreak to have their children vaccinated. They should have some type of classes for women who are pregnant to learn about vaccinations or at doctor appointments have to see a specialist to learn about vaccinations and how to prevent outbreaks. To learn about the misconceptions so that they don't have fears of vaccinations. People need to know the truth, that vaccinations do more good than harm. It would also be smart to have these classes so that you will know who to vote for in the presidential election. You don't want to vote for someone who doesn't support vaccinations and will cause outbreaks to occur. When an outbreak occurs, the government has to pay for it. You don't want to vote someone into office who will cause the debt of our country to increase even more. Children and adults need to be vaccinated to protect not only themselves, but to protect those who aren't able to protect to.

