It is not uncommon for humans to wait until something bad happens before they take a reactive measure to fix it. That doesn’t mean to say that people cannot or will not take proactive measures either. When it comes to our safety we are taught to buckle our seatbelts in the car, we even dish out money to insure our homes and cars in the event of a future disaster. Some people even buy expensive home security systems to prevent their possessions from being stolen. But for some odd reason, when it comes to public healthcare, the system is designed to act reactively. The doctor’s office is a place designed for people to visit after they get sick, and doctors are trusted to prescribe medicine to make their patients healthy again. Usually when one is sick and given medication, there is no second thought about the possible side effects. Being sick at that moment makes those side effects seem like nothing. All they want is to feel better again. What if there was a medicine that can proactively prevent someone from catching some of the most painful and dangerous diseases? And even better, this type of medicine is given at most, once every year in a quick shot form, some forms are even administered once in a lifetime. In fact, this medicine does exist.  Many state laws require parents to vaccinate their children and most schools require a specific list of vaccinations for enrollment. As babies, we are either vaccinated or not vaccinated against major diseases such as measles, TB, hepatitis, and more. It is important to learn about why vaccinations have become a controversial topic and about the numerous benefits of vaccinations rather than only self-immunity. People should be educated about vaccinations and regularly vaccinate their children when possible. Because social media has exaggerated the rare possible side effects to extreme measures, many people don’t vaccinate and even protest mandatory vaccinations, while vaccinations can offer self immunity, help those unable to get vaccinated, use herd immunity, and even rid a disease all together. 

Vaccinations have been around for many years now while, and some doctors and scientists would consider vaccines to be one of the greatest tools in the medical field. Just think about this: A tiny sample of a disease can be injected into someone, without making the person sick and experience the disease’s symptoms, which then grants that individual immunity against the disease in the future. The only side effect that person experienced, was light bruising at the injection site. For most vaccines, that is the process. With a bunch of science and medical stuff going on too. Some vaccines require only one injection while others might require three spread apart over several months. This is because the strain being injected needs to be injected into stages to allow the body to create anti-bodies but still prevent the individual from getting sick. The flu vaccine on the other hand is injected every year, the flu virus is a very versatile virus that can evolve and mutate at a rate of almost once year. Therefore, doctors recommend getting a new vaccine every year to keep up with the mutated virus. But from learning all this, why do people go to extra lengths to protest vaccines and make the choice to not vaccinate their kids? For most people the injection site redness, tenderness, and possible bruising, just for a couple of days, is the only tradeoff for immunity against diseases. For others, in rare cases, they can experience side effects that range from headaches, fatigue, seizures, anaphylaxis, to infertility and, in extreme, rare cases, death (Jameson, Cathy). It is also not uncommon to find that some people are allergic to the additives in vaccines that preserve the vaccine until it can be distributed, or help the body accept the vaccine and make the proper antibodies for immunity. Not to be discouraging though, for about any medication, prescribed or over-the-counter, there is a very similar list of side effects. It goes back to the saying “Too much of anything can kill you, even water.” So, how often does someone read the entire label of Advil and analyze whether the side effects are worth soothing their sore throat and calming their fever?

When most of these side effects are also associated with common over-the-counter medications, why do people still hesitate to get vaccinations? Is it because they require doctor’s visit? It is because it’s a shot? In fact, there are several reasons why people continue to hesitate vaccinating. Some religions believe that they should not receive any medical assistance from doctors and that their well-being, health, and fate are determined solely by their higher-power. There are though, several religions that do support immunizations. In other cases, people refuse vaccines because of what they have heard about on the web. Stahl explains how the rate of people who get vaccines regularly has declined since the social media world has skyrocketed. He provides some data and graphs, such as Figure 1 (Stahl, J.P), which represents the number of times any form of media related to vaccines is shared on several different social media sites. In this figure, you can see that the number of shares on Twitter is substantially higher than other social media types. This is important because Twitter is one of the largest and most used social media sites on the web. While social media is an easy way to share stuff on the internet with all your friends, it makes spreading false or exaggerated information about vaccines spread quickly and hard to control.  According to Stahl, hesitancy to vaccinate leads to more outbreaks in diseases. The last thing the world needs is abundant outbreaks in harmful and deadly diseases.

While the internet did not originally spread the word about a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, that claim can still be found on many websites today. With a long, scary list of possible side effects, a link to an increasingly common motor disease can be easily believed. In 1998, The Lancet, an article, was released in a medical journal that claimed the autism gene was caused by certain “environmental factors” such as ones found in the MMR diseases (Flaherty, Dennis K). And since the vaccine is a very tiny strain of the disease, that must prove a link between the vaccine and autism, right? For a while many people believed that article and the word spread quickly. The impact was so large that England had a major measles epidemic which spread to other neighboring countries (Flaherty). Because people stopped vaccinating their children with the autism causing vaccine. It took 10 years until the article was proven fraudulent. It was then removed from the journal in 2010 and the author was charged with “ethical, medical, and scientific misconduct in the publication of the autism paper” (Flaherty). Yet, the misconception that autism could be caused by a vaccine is still widely believed and many people refuse to get vaccines and vaccinate their children because of that false information. 

So, what do you do if you decide not to vaccinate your children? Unless you go with the bubble/quarantine route, there is no certain way to protect an unvaccinated child from coming into contact with the disease. The human immune system is designed to have almost a memory system. It creates antibodies to fight off harmful viruses and bacteria, and can remember which antibodies to use for which disease for the rest of your life (Incao F, Philip). Unfortunately, if you’ve never experienced any contact with the disease before, you most likely don’t have the antibodies to fight it off. With that, it doesn’t matter how healthy you are, you will catch a disease and get sick. Amy Parker, mother of three, shares her story online about growing up unvaccinated. She wrote an article on www.voicesforvaccines.com, where anyone can publicly post their stories and opinions, specifically on the topic of vaccinations. She begins her story with how she was raised by very health-conscious parents. Eating only organic vegetables and meat, drinking water and no soda. With her parents taking the measures to live the healthiest life possible, Parker explains her childhood of sickness. She managed to catch MMR, chickenpox, whooping cough and more. She even developed a resistance against antibiotic medication itself. She got sick all the time because she kept coming into contact with an unfamiliar disease which wouldn’t have happened if she had been vaccinated for some of those diseases. She compares her own childhood to her children’s. They were vaccinated and other than chickenpox which they contracted before being old enough to receive the vaccine, they did not experience any other illnesses in their childhood. Parker describes her two oldest children as “healthier than she has ever been”. Many people who protest vaccinations use the scary side effects as the main argument, but the diseases themselves can leave people with lifelong impairments. Several people in Parker’s life experienced life-long disabilities due to contracting vaccine preventable diseases such as deafness and impaired eyesight, one who even died. She questions why, with the tragic situations in her experience, it is said that the complications from vaccines are more common than complications from diseases. According to Parker, if you believe that you child can survive the disease on their own, then they can handle the vaccine. With the vaccine at least, you don’t ever have to worry about catching the disease again and furthermore, the possible lifelong impairments. 

With knowing how vaccines work and why many people protest mandatory vaccinations, it is also important to know that self-immunity is not the only major benefit from getting vaccinated. According to Romana Libster, “Vaccines are one of the great successes of the 20th century’s public health.” A concept known as “herd immunity” plays a major role in why vaccines are mandatory in schools. Most schools allow people to bypass mandatory vaccinations when there are religious and medical reasons. Although it is not uncommon for people to claim a false religion so that they don’t have to vaccinate their child to enroll them in school.  How can a child who is allergic to a vaccine or does have a religious affiliation stay protected from a disease? Take a vaccinated community versus and unvaccinated community against a disease. If someone in the unvaccinated community encounters the disease, it will spread to every other unvaccinated person the original sick person comes into contact with. The disease will spread like the domino effect until most of the people are sick. But if that same person who got sick with the disease was in a community where most people are vaccinated, those who aren’t vaccinated are significantly less likely to encounter the disease because it is not spreading so rapidly. When the majority of a population is vaccinated, it dramatically reduces the risks that an unvaccinated citizen in that population encounters the disease and therefore is more likely to be protected against the disease. Similar to Figure 1 of C.J.E. Metcalf’s article, “Understanding Herd Immunity.”  Herd immunity is an important concept that allows a community to protect those who are unable to get vaccinated due to various reasons from major diseases. These include, children too young to be vaccinated, people on medication which limits their immune system, religious affiliations, and stated before, those with allergies against the vaccines themselves. 

While herd immunity offers protection to those in a population without immune defense, vaccines can also do something else pretty awesome. While less and less people get sick and aren’t catching these disease because of vaccinations, what happens to the disease itself? The disease strains are almost like parasites, they need to be able to spread from person to person to survive. When more and more people gain immunity from the disease it will eventually become less and less apparent until there are no more documented cases of the disease found in people. This is exactly what happened to the smallpox virus. The smallpox virus is essentially the first and yet the only successful virus to have no current documented cases and the only known strains of it remain in government laboratories (Donald R. Hopkins). Smallpox was one of the deadliest diseases at the time, compared to the plague, it killed at least twenty-five percent of its victims. It may have even killed more people than the plague (Hopkins). The first successful vaccination was developed because of the smallpox disease. It was found that a vaccine could be made from the pustule of a scab from someone who was already sick. They later found that a similar disease of smallpox was apparent in cattle. Edward Jenner experimented with cowpox in cows and eventually made a vaccination for smallpox out of cowpox, that would be used to immunize children (Hopkins). Jenner created the “vaccination era” which gave medical science a new beginning to creating medicine. With this technology, back in the 1700’s, a vaccine was able to completely control the spread of a disease and rid it all together. It seems strange that there aren’t more diseases that have been controlled or exterminated given the technology today. If more people vaccinate themselves and their children, diseases will become less apparent and the smallpox will no longer be the only eradicated disease. 

Vaccines are a powerful preventative measure to keep yourself and loved ones safe from harmful diseases. They basically train your immune system to acknowledge how to fight off a virus or bacteria before you become sick with it. It is important to educate and learn how vaccines work to keep you healthy. The side effects of vaccines are not as common as they may seem when discovered on social media where billions of people can share exaggerated or false information at rapid speeds. According to statistics found in an article by J. P Stahl, the rate of people getting vaccinations has decreased significantly since the social media world has boomed. While rare side effects seem scary, almost any over the counter medicine has a very similar list of side effects as well. People who protest vaccines because of the harmful side effects should also consider protesting any other medication with those side effects. It is also important to understand that immunizations offer more than just self-immunity against a disease. Vaccines also offer the people in a community to protect those who cannot received vaccines from the same diseases. Due to various medical conditions or religious values, some people can’t get vaccines and rely on their fellow community members to protect them from coming into contact with the bacteria or virus.  With herd immunity, a disease can become less and less apparent until no more documented cases are found and eventually be eradicated like the smallpox virus. People should vaccinate themselves and their children, when possible, because it helps more than just themselves but their community as well as fights against the disease’s ability to survive. Vaccinations truly are one of the best medical tools today and more vaccinations will be made for other diseases while expanding the medical technology. People can continue to train their immune systems by getting immunized and therefore people will be getting less sick and have stronger immunity. 
