Informative Speech Outline On Vaccines

Protect our Future! Get Vaccinated!!

Topic: Vaccines
General Purpose: To inform
Specific Purpose: inform my audience on the importance of vaccinating their children; specifically, clear up issues regarding their safety and the possible outcomes of not receiving vaccines.
Thesis: There are many misconceptions regarding the safety of vaccines but the reality of the issue is that if we stopped giving our children vaccines it would not only negatively impact the health of our children now but future generations.

I. INTRODUCTION
a. Attention getting device: When I was young my dad never wanted me to receive the flu shot but every year without fail I would get sick with the flu. Sometimes I would get so sick that I would be bedridden for days

with a fever, countless fits of coughing and worst of all body aches. According to a study published by Public Health Reports, the official journal of the US Public Health Service, 63 percent of parents fear that their child could develop side effects due to receiving vaccines. Moreover, 57 percent of parents believe that vaccines cause autism and 78 percent think that children are required to take too many shots.
b. Relevance of topic to audience: Many parents nowadays are scared to vaccinate their children due to many circulating articles negatively attacking vaccines as well as people on television and even some doctors advocating for the decrease in vaccinations. However, I encourage you to reconsider vaccinating your children. You could be saving their life.
c. Establish credibility: As a pharmacy student, I take a lot of classes that help in my understanding of the human body and how it works. Using this knowledge I apply it to how drugs work to help our bodies achieve optimal health which includes vaccines.
d. Thesis: There are many misconceptions regarding the safety of vaccines but the reality of the issue is that if we choose to stop vaccinating our children it would not only negatively impact the health of our children now but future generations.
e. Preview: Though the argument against vaccines covers a broad range of topics, the main points that I will discuss are:
i. The misconceptions regarding the safety of vaccines
ii. The outcome of not getting vaccinated
iii. The importance of getting your children vaccinated

Transition: [To begin with, I will bring to light some misconceptions of the safety of vaccines and their results]

II. BODY
a. Causing autism is one of the many reasons why people don’t want to give their kids the MMR vaccine otherwise known as the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.
i. The link between autism and vaccines (particularly the MMR vaccine) was popularized by a study performed by a British surgeon named Andrew Wakefield.
1. However, the study was discredited due to 14 different studies done around the world getting results that proved there was no link between autism and vaccines. In fact, the studies showed that symptoms of autism develop in children before being of age to receive the MMR vaccine and even more recent studies show that these symptoms can start as early as a fetus.
ii. Moreover, according to an excerpt from Palaestra (a medical journal), Autism Speaks, one of the biggest organizations for autism, retracted their previous stance on the link between autism and the MMR vaccine.
iii. Again this was due to about two decades of research indicating that the MMR vaccine was in no way linked to autism.
iv. While we don’t know what causes autism, we do know that getting the MMR vaccine as a child is not one of them.
b. You may also be thinking that vaccines contain toxic ingredients that shouldn’t be injected into your body.
i. While it’s true that vaccines contain toxic ingredients such as formaldehyde, mercury and aluminum, these are found in very low concentrations within vaccines.
ii. In fact, your own body produces more formaldehyde than what’s contained in vaccines!!
iii. In addition to formaldehyde, mercury also posed a main concern to many parents- as this was one of the ingredients supposedly linking vaccines to autism. However due to years of research, and as stated previously this belief was proven false. Today, the only vaccine that has mercury in it is the flu vaccine and even that comes in a non- preservative/ mercury- free form.
iv. Aluminum is even safer than mercury as it’s found in the blood of babies. Really, the amount of aluminum is so small in vaccines that it doesn’t even affect the aluminum levels in the baby’s blood even immediately after the vaccine has been injected.
c. Additionally, you may be concerned that vaccines could be overloading your child’s immune system with viruses and bacteria.
i. According to Harvard’s Women Health Watch, vaccines contain only a small amount of viruses and bacteria compared to what our bodies are exposed to in our everyday environment.
ii. And the germs that most of these vaccines contain are very weak or killed germs which won’t overwhelm your immune system.
iii. Really the point of a vaccine is to strengthen our immune systems by allowing it to build a very strong defense against diseases.

Transition: [Apart from the safety concerns about vaccines, I will also address what could happen as a result of not getting vaccinated]

d. Outbreaks could occur due to a decrease in the amount of people getting vaccinated.
i. Many of us here in America have fallen into a false sense of security with our health. Living in this country where vaccine preventable diseases are basically nonexistent enables us to believe that we no longer need vaccines. However, this is wrong due to a concept called herd immunity.
ii. Herd immunity is when most of the people within a certain population receive the appropriate immunizations inadvertently protecting those who won’t or can’t get vaccinated. This is a complicated balancing act in that if there is an increase in the amount of people who don’t get vaccinated the chance of catching a vaccine preventable disease also increases. Furthermore, if more and more people choose to not get vaccinated diseases that were once thought to be virtually eradicated can now make a comeback.
e. In some cases though there are those who can’t get vaccinated like infants. This is a very important issue as whooping cough otherwise known as pertussis has started to become an increasing problem in the US.
i. According to the US Public Health Services in 2010, California saw 9,120 cases of whooping cough, more than any year since the whooping cough vaccine was introduced in the 1940s. Ten infants too young to be vaccinated died of whooping cough during the outbreak.
ii. This could have been prevented had the family members that were around these infants been vaccinated for whooping cough.
f. There was also a measles outbreak in the US in 2010. Though the measles had been reportedly eradicated from the US in 2000, there were 102 cases reported nationwide.
i. Looking at the bigger picture 102 cases isn’t much but it was an increase nonetheless and made even scarier by the fact that there were close to no reported cases since 2000. Moreover, the number of outbreaks and cases could increase if people don’t get vaccinated for the measles.

Transition: [Furthermore, our future, your children need to be vaccinated to prevent any more of these outbreaks from happening.]

g.

Start vaccinating them when they are young.
i. There are immunization schedules that most pediatricians follow that were based on the recommendations by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP).
ii. The reason health care professionals stress the importance of protecting your children early in life is because that’s when they’re at their most vulnerable. Some parents and even pediatricians will allow for alternative immunization schedules or even waiting for the child to get older before giving them the expected immunizations.
1. However a lot of research has been done to back up the scheduled time of all the vaccines so unless completely necessary it’s highly recommended to follow the immunization schedule.

III. CONCLUSION:
a. Re- state purpose and review of main points: Vaccines were purposefully designed to help our immune system fight off certain diseases, not cause even more health problems. They have been tested to ensure their effectiveness as well as their safety. In the long run you will only be hurting yourselves, your children and the health of everyone around you if you decide against

vaccinations.
b. Close with impact: If my dad had done his research and listened to my doctor I wouldn’t have had to spend days in bed with a high fever, countless fits of coughing and body aches. Now that I’m older and can make decisions for myself I get the flu shot every year and since then I have not had the flu or if I did it was a very mild case. Vaccinations are imperative to not just your health now but for the health of future generations. Protect our future! Get vaccinated!