
Vaccines have been praised over the years for accomplishments such as nearly eradicating deadly diseases like polio and smallpox, with more and more vaccines being produced and researched to better our world with less disease, that is the goal at least.  As the number of people vaccinated yearly continues to rise, connections have been made to the also increasing number of post-natal autism cases occurring in young children.  This has raised the question amongst worried parents across the country, “are vaccines safe for my child?”, a simple question with a not so simple answer, with doctors contradicting each other and many people these days scouring the internet in search of answers, it’s difficult to cypher through what’s true and false.  Through my research I have found many reliable sources with differing opinions, some say the idea of vaccines leading to autism is outrageous, others are outraged with the deceit of our government in allowing vaccines to fly free with their causative agents of autism.  While there does seem to be some sort of connection between autism and vaccinations, it’s important to remember that vaccines are credited for saving millions of lives over the years due to prevention and destruction of numerous deadly diseases.  Yes, there seems to be a certain danger of vaccinations, but when looking at our species as a whole and what they have accomplished for us in the past, vaccines are clearly worth the risk, but when has the improvement of the species really outweighed the stubbornness and power of self-determination our species seems to cling to so tightly.  Before understanding the controversy surrounding vaccinations, it’s important to learn the origin of vaccines and how the controversy itself began.

  The use of vaccination has been around for hundreds of years.  Although an English Physician named Edward Jenner is considered the father of vaccinology in the west, vaccination practices have been in use on smaller scales, such as “Buddhist monks drinking snake venom in order to achieve immunity to snake bites (Immunisation Advisory Centre)”, around the world long before his birth.  The first vaccine that resembles something you’d see today came around in 1798 when Jenner inoculated a young boy with cowpox in order to create immunity to smallpox, leading to its eventual eradication.  This breakthrough forever changed the world of medicine, jumpstarting a new front in prevention of disease unlike the world had ever seen.  As time progressed, more and more diseases fell victim to almost complete eradication by the power of vaccines, but rarely does something with such great achievement go unchallenged by the easily frightened ears of the public.  

The controversy that continues today began with the MMR Vaccine, which pertains to the prevention of measles, mumps, and rubella.  The vaccine was introduced in 1971 in the United States, but in 1998 a research paper was published in the medical journal, “The Lancet”, supporting the claim that the MMR vaccine is directly linked to colitis and autism spectrum disorders.  This claim was later discredited, but not before the media caught wind and spread a lasting fear over the population that still runs strong to this day.  Since the “Lancet” article in 1998, many have investigated such claims with many opposing outcomes, fanning the flame of fear surrounding vaccines.  With the claims of vaccination danger came a drastic decline of vaccinations, leading to a significant increase in outbreaks of measles and mumps causing deaths and severe, in some cases permanent, injuries.  Government investigations were launched in hopes of putting the fear and wavering trust in not only our government, but our doctors, to rest. The outcomes of course, supported vaccines.  No evidence of links between vaccinations and autism were found in these government investigations, but it seems that’s not good enough as the fear in parents still remains, putting countless children at risk to diseases that otherwise pose no threat without the absence of vaccination.  Many have criticized the involvement of mass media in the controversy, blaming it for displaying much more credibility to the allegations than was deserved.  The internet also played a vital role in the demoralization of vaccination use.  Seemingly endless amounts of uncredited information floating around the web has not only added to the scare, but jumbled the path to correct research by basically evening the playing field between support for and against vaccination practices.  The imprinted fear and ideas of danger arisen from vaccinations can’t solely be due to the media’s inflammation of a debunked article, that’s simply the beginning.  It is important to understand that the fear and uncertainty surrounding vaccinations is like a fire, whereas the wood is the ever so often case or “development” thrown in to keep the flame alive. 

There is no question, whether from the drastic decrease in child vaccinations or increase in cases of vaccine prevented diseases, that a growing number of parents aren’t vaccinating their children. Fear is a driving force for this issue, but just how justified is this fear that seems to be claiming more and more parents?  In a video posted to YouTube in 2013 called “Do Vaccines Cause Autism?”, the narrator claims the reason autism and vaccination links are still controversial is due to the government blocking parents of children with “Vaccine Induced Autism” from seeing a real courtroom, using the “National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act” to shield pharmaceutical companies from taking the blame of any injury caused by their vaccines.  Instead, affected families must petition to the Department of Health and Human Services for compensation, basically a dead end alternative with no real solution and little hope for actual compensation.  Now this all means nothing if vaccines don’t cause autism, but numbers show that the US Autism Rate has gone from one-in-ten-thousand to one-in-fifty since the United States Government has begun the practice of mandatory vaccination. It is undeniable that something is causing this drastic increase of children with autism, but is it vaccinations? A debate on child vaccinations was conducted on the TV show “The Doctors” in 2008, where multiple guests spoke of personal experiences where their children were vaccinated and then hours later began losing language and other mental/motor skills, some even losing consciousness and convulsing, and later developing autism and other disorders like Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Cases like these are causing the loss in trust of vaccines seen so widespread today, leaving many to ask, “why are so many highly vaccinated children so sick (-Barbara Loe Foster, Co-Founder of The National Vaccine Center)”. Many see the scare of autism as outweighing compared to the diseases vaccines are meant to prevent.  For those parents who wish to not vaccinate their children may find that easier said than done, as vaccines are a requirement for many states in the U.S., with few allowing personal or religious exemptions.  It’s understandable that parents lack trust in vaccines, with more and more beginning to question the safety of vaccines and why should they take the risk of exposing their young child to something as disabling as autism, especially after seeing the stress and problems brought to families afflicted by such.  

If vaccines are the problem, is it really a solution to just stop vaccinations altogether, even after seeing all they’ve accomplished?  The smart route would be to revisit the whole concept of vaccinations and understand what it is that makes users susceptible to ailments such as autism.  It’s feared, and rightly so, that a stop in vaccinations could cause a resurfacing of diseases almost eradicated in a way that we may not be able to control.  Cases of diseases thought close to be extinct have begun to pop up in communities where parents generally chose to not vaccinate their children.  The resurrection of diseases like the mumps and smallpox is something to worry about, for these diseases were known to infect and kill millions before a breakthrough known as a vaccine revolutionized preventative medicine. 

Many people, including doctors, have linked autism to vaccine use, but what exactly does that mean? If vaccines really are a contributing factor to autism, how exactly do they play a part, what’s really the problem?  Many people have tried to answer this, one of them being Dr. Chris Shaw, a neurologist at the University of British Columbia.  Dr. Shaw sites the high use of aluminum in our society, being that it’s found in most all products we use today, vaccines are no exception, but how exactly does aluminum link to autism?  “When aluminum comes from a vaccine, it stays in the body, and studies have shown that the adjuvants do not stay localized but rather travel to the brain where they can be detected up to a year after the injection (Walia)”, the paper sheds light on aluminum, explaining how it’s a strong suspect in the “development of a wide body of neurodegenerative disease, one of them being autism (Walia)”.  Dr. Shaw goes on to talk about how even though the world has been using aluminum adjuvants for about ninety years, there still remains a significantly poor understanding about their mechanisms of action.  Despite the many unknowns about aluminum use, aluminum used in vaccines being safe is still widely accepted.  It’s important that this changes, experimental research has shown that the use of aluminum in vaccines has the “potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans (Shaw)”; some of these disorders include a risk for autoimmunity, long-term brain inflammation, and associated neurological complications.  Mercury is a chemical that may sound familiar, it too is found in many vaccines.  What’s odd is mercury, along with aluminum, is also widely known for being a neurotoxin.  With no adequate study on these chemicals, it’s worrisome how widely used and accepted they are.  It’s understood these chemicals are toxins, but what do they have to do with neurological disorders like autism?  The “molecules (aluminum and mercury) negatively affect many of the same biochemical processes and enzymes implicated in the etiology of autism (Shaw)”, elevating the possibly of a relation between the two.  With a chemical like mercury being one of the leading suspected causes in the development of autism, and also being a known ingredient of vaccines, it’s no shock many have linked the two together.  What’s good is chemicals like aluminum have begun to be restricted in the sense of the amount used in vaccines, a step in the right direction towards one-hundred percent safe vaccines. 

Now that I’ve represented why many believe in not using vaccinations, what of those in favor, like our government and many of our doctors.  Many people forget a time when vaccines didn’t exist, but our government is not one of them. Disease used to run rampant through populations with nothing to stop it, until the invention of the vaccine.  They have been credited for ending major epidemics that took many lives, a literal answer to prayers thought never to be heard.  A problem thought never to be solved had been just that, solved.  The reason our government, and probably your doctor, support the use of vaccinations is because they are extremely effective when it comes to preventing illness, precisely what it was intended to do.  If its impressive resume doesn’t satisfy, what of the countless clinical investigations and studies conducted on vaccines to insure their safety and rule out links to autism?  All these studies are there, they have all be done and published, sadly that hasn’t done much to persuade the public into trust.  Is it simply distrust in the government for, well, being the government, or is the media just doing its job too well, or perhaps a mixture of both?

  The issue to doctors at this point is not the safety of vaccinations, its regaining their deserved authority on the subject.  In the defense of medicine, doctors are doing what they are trained to do.  Surely I’m not saying you have to be a doctor in order to know what you’re talking about in respect to medicine, specifically vaccines, but many people who aren’t experts in the field feel entitled to make claims they can’t fully back up.  This isn’t to say that all accusations not in favor of vaccines are wrong in turn to lack of knowledge, for some very intelligent doctors are skeptical when it comes to the safety of vaccinations, but these accusations do little help and usually result in loss of trust and panic from the public. When those interested in the subject take research into their own hands, the internet remains the main source of doing so, a source filled with very useful and accurate information, but also completely false information as well.  For many people it’s difficult to know the difference between the two, this only harms what information we have on vaccines for its useless if people can’t discover for themselves what’s true.  Whether vaccines are safe or not, it remains difficult to know if such accusations, on both sides, are righteous and safe to believe. This leaves many parents unsure what to believe, only building the reluctance to use vaccines.  Parents just don’t want to risk the health of their child for something they don’t fully understand, largely in part to the lack of reliable information.  This needs to change.  What parents don’t understand is that by choosing not to vaccinate they are only putting their children in harm’s way.  The diseases that vaccines are meant to prevent may be rare in our time, but they are silently waiting for the chance to strike, and when they do it will be upon unvaccinated children with no immunity to defend itself. 

After carefully investigating both sides to the controversy that is vaccines, I find it difficult to deny that vaccinations have played some part in the increasing numbers of autism cases seen in recent decades.  While there may not be as much evidence supporting a link between autism and vaccines as there is not, there is still too much evidence to not leave it as a real possibility.  Not to say vaccines are a direct cause of autism, but there is clearly a link between the two, a link too large to dismiss.  To conclude there’s a link does not mean vaccines should be put out of use. Yes, I believe there’s a link, but when you take into account just how much vaccines have done for us in terms of prevention, there should be no reason not to partake in this advantage of nature.  The fear of autism is real and respectable in that sense, it is definitely something to be worried about, but not for a moment does the risk outweigh the benefit. Vaccines are too precious and worth too much to be cast aside, without vaccines it is very possible none of us could be here. Whether vaccines carry a risk of autism, a small risk even, it matters not, for the benefits that come with vaccinations are that of assurance and prevention. Prevention of deadly diseases that have claimed countless lives, something we no longer have to fear, thanks to vaccines. 
