Vaccines save lives; fear endangers lives. While opposition to vaccines is as old as the vaccines themselves, vaccines work. They have kept children healthy and most importantly, alive. Most vaccines given in childhood years are around 90-99% effective in preventing disease. So why would you keep such an advantage away from your child? The anti-vaccination movement has become a global epidemic, spreading across social media and poisoning people’s minds along the way, resulting in an exponentially increasing number of parents refusing to vaccinate their children, causing easily preventable diseases to spread, infecting those same children, then potentially, ending in their tragic, inevitable death.
The anti-vaccination movement has become a global pandemic, spreading across social media and poisoning people’s minds along the way. This stigma towards vaccines has only caused a lot of unnecessary problems to occur in this already problem-filled world. It has caused numerous measles outbreaks amongst children;
Many ‘anti-vaxxers’ may argue that giving a chid multiple vaccinations for different diseases at the same time increases the risk of harmful side effects and the immune system will not be able to cope as it will overload and weaken the child’s immune system. However, the reality is that children are actually exposed to more antigens in one day from the environment than there are antigens in all vaccines they get combined. An antigen is a toxin or other foreign substance that prompts the body’s immune response, particularly the body’s antibody production. Children are continuously exposed to large amounts of bacteria, even the food we eat exposes antigens – does this mean we should stop feeding our children? In addition to this, the vaccines that we are injected with contain either a weakened or killed version of the bacteria or virus; in fact, some vaccines don’t actually have any! A vaccine is used to expose the body's immune system to a small, weakened version of the preventable disease. This process induces the body to produce antibodies to fight off the infection, teaching the immune system how to fight off the disease. This means if the body ever comes into contact with said disease they won’t be affected by it as the immune system already knows how to fight it off. For example, you may be familiar with chickenpox, and how a child never gets the chickenpox again after the first time they are affected by it, this is because their body has produced the right antibodies to fight them off. Vaccines work in the same way but do not make a child sick.
On the topic of immunity through vaccines, some may argue that natural immunity is so much better than immunity through vaccination. Natural immunity occurs when a child becomes infected with said infection/disease and the immune system is left to fight it off. If they survive the infection, they will become immune to the virus that caused it, just like chickenpox, so if it works with chickenpox, why can’t it work with everything else, am I right? Well. The risk associated to vaccines is nowhere near the risk associated without them. In developed countries measles affect 1 in 500 people, whereas the very vaccine that prevents it (the MMR vaccine) causes a severe reaction in 1 in a million people. To put this is into perspective, 500 seconds is 8 minutes and 1 million seconds is 12 days, using the internet as an example; depending on your internet connection, there is a chance you would be offline for 1 second every 8 minutes, or for 1 second every 12 days. Measles is a “highly infectious viral illness that can be very unpleasant and sometimes lead to serious complications” according to the NHS. If you wanted to develop natural immunity to measles, you would need to contract it first. However, it can cause many uncomfortable symptoms and give rise to several complications, and you may need to stay in a hospital bed for a couple days. Several parents have risked this for ‘natural’ immunity and it has resulted in 1,261 individual cases of measles from January 1 to November 7 of 2019, have been confirmed in 31 states.
This could easily have prevented from some liquid in a syringe, the World Health Organisation lists vaccines as causing an 80% decrease in measles, a percentage that high could eventually lead to eliminating the disease altogether. However, the very vaccine that prevents measles ( the MMR vaccine) has been proven to cause autism right? Wrong. The study that concluded with the MMR vaccine causing autism was conducted by Andrew Wakefield, a British Surgeon. His study only involved a total of 12 children, whereas a more credible, large-scale study with over 90,000 children did not have the same results as Wakefield’s did. Medical officials also investigated his research, they found his medical practices to be deleterious and his medical license was revoked from him. There is also evidence that suggests that autism develops when you’re in the uterus – nowhere near the time that vaccines are being inoculated. But let me ask you a question, would you rather let your child not be vaccinated and die, or vaccinate your child for them to potentially have autism?
What in the vaccines may cause the autism you ask? Well, it could potentially be the ‘unsafe toxins’ that are put in the vaccines such as aluminium, mercury and/or formaldehydes. But did you know that in an average day we eat, breathe and drink around 30 to 50mg of aluminium, that’s 20 times more than the amount of aluminium that is allowed in vaccines. Plus the aluminium gives so many beneficial effects such as; it helps boost our immune response, it makes the vaccine more effective, it makes the vaccine last longer, it reduces the amount of antigens needed - which was already covered - and it can even potentially decrease the dosage amount required to become immune. The mercury in the vaccines is actually ethylmercury, which is in a substance called thimerosal. Thimerosal is added to vaccines to prevent the growth of germs – leading to a large decreased risk in infection, and the large claim that the thimerosal was what caused autism is completely false as the vaccine that allegedly caused it – the MMR vaccine – never actually contained it. The formaldehydes contained in vaccines are also found naturally in our blood stream – in much higher levels than you can find in the syringe, the purpose of them is to kill the toxins in the bacteria or virus, this happens by diluting the antigen when the antigens are deactivating it, making it totally safe.
Let me put it to you straight. Vaccines save lives. Members of the ‘anti-vaxx’ movement are delusional, and think they are right for conspiring against the better judgement of the government – thinking the government do not care about our wellbeing. Their immense claims about vaccines causing autism due to the toxins that are in them and if you give them too much of those toxins it might overload the child’s immune system is all bollocks. If people put their own research into important matters like these this wouldn’t happen and children wouldn’t die.
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The Anti-vaccine Movement Infecting Modern Medicine.
(2022, February 18). Edubirdie. Retrieved December 25, 2024, from https://edubirdie.com/examples/the-anti-vaccine-movement-infecting-modern-medicine/
“The Anti-vaccine Movement Infecting Modern Medicine.” Edubirdie, 18 Feb. 2022, edubirdie.com/examples/the-anti-vaccine-movement-infecting-modern-medicine/
The Anti-vaccine Movement Infecting Modern Medicine. [online].
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The Anti-vaccine Movement Infecting Modern Medicine [Internet]. Edubirdie.
2022 Feb 18 [cited 2024 Dec 25].
Available from: https://edubirdie.com/examples/the-anti-vaccine-movement-infecting-modern-medicine/
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