Vaccination Argumentative Essay

792 Words2 Pages

Children commonly get vaccinations from birth and all throughout their childhood. This high number of immunizations, which would be about forty or more by age 18, is quite a lot and can be seemingly excessive. Babies can receive up to four to five vaccinations at a time during their well-baby visits at the doctor’s office. Vaccinations are meant to protect against childhood diseases, some of which are highly contagious and can be fatal, but do we really need all forty of them? With the better healthcare and the adoption of healthy lifestyles, it hardly seems necessary that all vaccinations are needed. Schools can be a danger zone for sickness and disease, but if other families are able to maintain a healthy living, there is less risk. Mandating …show more content…

Doctors always assure that side effects are rare and if there are any, they are very minimal, such as soreness, redness, and fever. What we hear in the media of vaccines being linked to autism may have been debunked, but there have been studies of other side effects as well. The chapter on “Neurologic Disorders” in The Institute of Medicine’s Adverse Effects of Vaccines, states that “it is biologically plausible that injection of an inactivated virus, bacterium, or live attenuated virus might induce in the susceptible host an autoimmune response by deregulation of the immune response” (IOM, 48). This means that it is possible that a vaccine can cause a person’s immune system to attack the person’s own cells and tissues, causing demyelinating diseases such as encephalomyelitis or multiple sclerosis. Other side effects and harm vaccines can cause are anaphylaxis, which is a life-threatening allergic reaction, and death from “administration of live viral vaccine [that] could cause a systemic infection in the recipient” (IOM, 60, 277). So although most vaccines are “safe”, there is always the risk of side effects that are as harmful or more deadly than the disease

Open Document