Mandatory Vaccination Regarding Children
Vaccinations are common practice in developed countries and a majority of people realize the importance of vaccinating their children. In the United States, it’s required by law to have children vaccinated before entering school or daycare. However, there are a number of parents who want to opt out of vaccinating their children; either due to religious/personal reasons or because they’re skeptical about vaccines. While the law does require children to be vaccinated, it comes with exemptions such as religious reasons, medical reasons, and philosophical reasons against vaccinating children. Medical reasons such as immune system deficiency from a current disease, like cancer, is an understandable reason to not have the child vaccinated. However, there have been questions as to whether or not states should allow parents to be exempt from vaccinating their children due to religious or philosophical beliefs. I believe that, other than medical reasons, there shouldn’t be exemptions from law requiring children to be vaccinated before entering school or daycare.
The reason exemptions and hesitancy towards vaccines exist is due to people who are anti-vaccine. Whether it’s religious/personal beliefs or simply being misinformed, there are parents who will refuse to have their children vaccinated. When the US made it a requirement to have children vaccinated before going to schools/daycares, there were debates on whether or not this requirement “infringed upon individual autonomy and liberty.” (Ethical Issues and Vaccines). While people do have a right to personal preferences involving their body, and in this case their children, it shouldn’t come with the risk of contracting a harmful disease. Not being vaccinated leaves a child vulnerable to easily preventable diseases that are now seen as rare because of the high vaccination rates.
The main reason why vaccinating children is so important is because of herd immunity. As long as a majority of children are vaccinated (around 92-94%) everyone, vaccinated and not vaccinated, are safe from the disease (Pierik). However, since there only needs to be 92-94% of children vaccinated, that leaves room for about 6-8% of children whose parents can choose to opt them out of vaccinations. Many anti-vaccination parents claim that if herd immunity is really helpful, then it wouldn’t matter in their children aren’t vaccinated as long as all the other children are vaccinated. If enough parents assume that other parents will vaccinate their own children and not have their children vaccinated, that 92-94% of vaccinated children will go down; risking the herd immunity to decrease. The anti-vaccination parents are relying on other parents to have their children vaccinated in order to keep the herd immunity which lets them get away with not vaccinating their children using non-medical exemptions.
Many harmful diseases such as measles, smallpox, polio, mumps, etc. are prevented by the widespread vaccination programs. Because of the high immunization rates, these diseases are very rare today. A survey was taken in Canada where they asked parents with children 5-years-old and under a series of questions. One of those questions being “vaccination is less important than it used to be because we have eradicated most childhood diseases” (Greenberg et al). While a majority (83%) disagreed with that statement, 17% believe that the statement is true which is concerning. Those parents who believe that vaccines aren’t as important now as they were before are more likely the ones who decide against vaccinating their children. If enough parents believe in that statement, the herd immunity will go down and can cause an outbreak of that disease. In 2015, there was an outbreak of measles–a disease preventable by vaccination– called the Disneyland outbreak, that spread throughout parts of the United States and had a case in Mexico (Pierik). The main reason for this outbreak is the amount of parents receiving nonmedical exemptions rising and therefore having a high number of children who were not vaccinated. The vaccination status for thirty-four of the patients from California during that outbreak showed that “28 were not vaccinated at all, one was partially vaccinated and five were fully vaccinated.” and among those thirty-four, six were too young to even receive their first dose of the vaccine (Aliferis). Parents need to understand the importance of vaccinating their children in order to prevent these types of outbreaks from happening; especially with diseases that are highly contagious like measles.
As stated earlier, there are exemptions to the legal vaccination requirement. There are two different exemptions aside from medical reasons that can be used to opt out of immunizations. Those exemptions could be religious or philosophical. There are also other reasons, not exemptions, as to why parents are hesitant to vaccinate their children; those are safety concerns and the need for more education over vaccinations (Bohannon and McKee). The most common exemption is because of religious reasons. Although the US has an amendment saying people have the freedom of religion, it shouldn’t be used as a way to opt out of vaccinating children. It’s understandable to want your values to be kept, but not at the risk of a child contracting a contagious disease and potentially spreading it to others. There are only four states that don’t allow religious exemptions for vaccination (Bohannon and McKee). Which means the vast majority of the US allows parents to not have their children vaccinated which, as stated before, will bring down the herd immunity if enough parents are using religion as an exemption.
Besides religious exemptions, there are also philosophical reasons as to why parents refuse to have their children immunized and it’s allowed by 20 states. Philosophical exemptions are fairly easier than religious exemptions. In New York, parents have to show legitimate belief in a higher being/God in order to be granted a religious exemption (Bohannon and McKee). Philosophical exemptions, however, simply have to check a box stating their desire to not vaccinate their child and that’s all (Novella). It shouldn’t be as simple as checking yes or no to have your child exempt from vaccinations; especially not required vaccinations. Ideally, there wouldn’t be any nonmedical exemptions if the government really pushed for vaccinating children before going to schools or daycares, but that’s obviously going to come with controversies and have people angry with the government for not having the right to choose. Since it’s not really feasible to get rid of all nonmedical exemptions at the current time, there needs to be stricter requirements in order to have a nonmedical exemption.
The two reasons for parents being hesitant to have their children immunized go together and those are safety concerns and need for more education on vaccines. Those go together in a way because parents who are concerned about the safety of a vaccine need to be educated more on vaccines. If they were, they’d have a better understanding about vaccines and be more willing to vaccinate their children. In the Canadian study stated earlier, it showed that about 57% of the parents who responded get their information about immunizations online-either from news sources or social media (Greenberg et al). It’s pretty well known that, while the internet is very useful source of information readily available to a majority of people, it can be misleading at times. There are websites that aren’t factually based and it’s allowed to be there because the internet isn’t just fact based. Which is why it might not be the best place to be getting medical information; at least not from social media. There are websites that are factually based and that are approved by medical professionals or are even run by medical professionals. However in that same study, only 5% of parents get the medical information from medical journals (Greenberg et al). That’s a small percentage that receives accurate medical information. There’s no way to have people willingly look up medical journals or find websites that are medically accurate. The only solution to raising the percentage of parents getting accurate information is to have the media talk about and use credible sources of information in order to inform parents about important medical procedures like immunizations.
The vaccination requirement made for children entering schools or daycares is important and something that shouldn’t have exemptions. The only exemptions that should be allowed with this requirement is medical exemptions which is perfectly reasonable. While people, in the US at least, have the freedom to practice their religion, not everyone shares the same religious or personal beliefs which makes it unreasonable to have those as an option to opt out of standard immunizations. Every child should be vaccinated before they enter school in order to keep the herd immunity at the percentage it needs to be; for themselves and the sake of those who don’t have the option to be vaccinated.