All children should receive the basic immunizations that doctors suggest before attending public school, unless they have a medical or religious exemption.
In Canada, it is unconstitutional to make vaccines mandatory. Only three provinces have requirements of all public school students. Ontario, New Brunswick and Manitoba all have basic requirements that must be met for children to attend school.
There are areas in California, in fact, with lower immunization rates than the African countries of Chad and Sudan.
With the recent outbreak of measles at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, the issue of children not receiving basic immunizations has been hotly debated in the news.
There is a fine line between the rights of parents and public health. Some kindergarten classrooms in California’s Bay Area have immunization rates as low as 45 per cent. This would hardly be adequate to protect those not vaccinated from infectious disease.
Public schools need to be a safe place for all children to attend. When there aren’t enough children receiving vaccines there isn’t the same level of protection for people who aren’t vaccinated, including those who are medically unable to be immunized.
This phenomenon is called herd immunity and it occurs when about 90 per cent of a population is immunized. It protects those with immunodeficiency and those who can’t have vaccines for religious reasons.
There is a large misconception about immunizations, that they cause developmental disorders such as autism. This misconception started in the medical journal The Lancet with a 1998 study conducted by Andrew Wakefield. The study was later proven to have been completely falsified. The study was widely panned in the scientific community and was retracted by The Lancet. The findings of the fake study are still in the public consciousness today.
This misconception spread like a virus. Former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy used her celebrity to further the notion that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine – or MMR – caused autism in her child. Oprah even gave her time on the couch to espouse her views about vaccines. She later recanted these views and said she regrets them, but like The Lancet study, no one pays attention when a retraction is made.
People only seem to remember the original headline on the front page, the story about the retraction doesn’t make front page news.
That misconception is still repeated today by prominent public officials such as Rand Paul, a United States Senator from Kentucky. He recently stated on television that he had seen cases in which parents had “walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.”
Paul is certainly not alone, the choice to not vaccinate has become a movement. Those who believe that immunizations are dangerous cannot be convinced otherwise, by any means.
These diseases that we now have vaccines for took an extremely devastating toll on us as a society. Polio permanently disfigured and paralyzed many of its victims. Those alive today that were victims of polio are living testament to the devastation the disease can produce. Infectious diseases like polio are far from the public consciousness and maybe that has impacted our perception of the dangers.
Much research has gone into the development of these vaccines. We should leave the analysis to the medical experts and scientists who develop these pharmaceuticals. In the Internet age, we all go on Google to diagnose ourselves and find answers that we find convenient.
On the same hand, the Internet has also made us more skeptical of everything that we see and read, including the advice of professionals.
Civil liberties are often brought up in the vaccine debate. But when it comes to this issue of civil liberty, not getting basic vaccinations infringes on public health and the civil liberties of others.
Whatever minimal negative effects there may be from vaccines, they pale in comparison to the effects of many of these diseases.