The recent news coverage that vaccines have been getting has brought to light a major difference in the opinions of the public regarding mandates for vaccinations. Should the government have the right to decide whether children should be vaccinated? Should the government allow people to put others at risk by not vaccinating their children?
I am a firm believer in science. I believe that there are things that we don’t know about and problems we don’t know how to solve. But looking back on how far we’ve come, I can’t help but put my faith in science and in what has been discovered and developed.
Some people argue that vaccines put their children at risk.
Member of the MIT class of 2011, Mahesh Vidula, wrote a paper looking at the debate regarding vaccination mandates and touched on this concern. He introduced the disease, pertussis, as an example.
Pertussis can cause severe breathing complications in children, but is now far less common than it had been in the past. He cited the CDC, saying that, “there were 150,000-260,000 cases of pertussis per year [in 1921].” But following the introduction of the pertussis vaccine, this number dropped dramatically, with recent studies saying that there have been 97.56% fewer cases of pertussis in the United States. And that is only one disease and one vaccine. There are so many other diseases that vaccines have been able to prevent in the past, and still do today.
That is hundreds of thousands of children not suffering because of the discoveries science has made. How would I not put my faith in something like that?
I think that where people shy away from these facts is when they see how much less common some of these diseases are today.
Let’s go back to the recent outbreak of measles. Measles became nationally known in the United States in 1912 (“Measles History”). Just to throw some numbers out there, according to the CDC:
“In the decade before 1963 when a vaccine became available, nearly all children got measles by the time they were 15 years of age. It is estimated 3 to 4 million people in the United States were infected each year. Also each year an estimated 400 to 500 people died, 48,000 were hospitalized, and 4,000 suffered encephalitis (swelling of the brain) from measles.”
Measles was announced officially eliminated from the United States in 2000.
So here’s a devastating disease that science saw the need to prevent, and succeeded. Measles hasn’t been a problem in the United States recently, but the root of the cause of this most recent outbreak is that people see this decrease in the number of cases as a sign that measles is gone for good. For that reason, they see this vaccine, that has saved lives, as unnecessary.
It’s flawed logic if you think about it. There is a devastating disease. Thankfully, science is able to produce something that will end that suffering. Science succeeds in ridding the area of the disease. People see that the disease is no longer a direct threat, they begin to distrust the very science that saved their children from suffering to begin with. They say that the disease is no longer a problem, and denounce the vaccine. And the disease comes back.
To me, this just proves more fully that vaccines work. The have been doing what they were meant to for hundreds of years. The amount of time and money that has gone into the research and development of the vaccines that are saving lives every day deserves some amount of respect and trust in that they will do what they are meant to. It seems ungrateful and disrespectful to those people who devote their entire lives to producing a single vaccine.
I plan to have a career in science, but I’m not completely set on one path. I’d like to work with babies, maybe a neonatologist or a pediatric surgeon. A part of my goal is to do research in the types of diseases most commonly seen in newborns and infants. It makes me think about what my goals are and how they’ll affect people in the future.
I could spend my life devoted to finding a vaccine to a specific disease, only to have people down the line decide that it isn’t necessary and depreciate all the work I would have put in.
I too have put faith in science when it comes to vaccines. It has been proven over and over again that vaccines work. I think that the government should be able to make people get vaccinated. I think it’s selfish for people to not vaccinate their children because of the risk it poses to other children.