Almost every child receives a total of fourteen vaccinations before age six. Almost. As discussed in the Frontline episode “The Vaccine War”, some parents choose not to vaccinate their children against diseases such as measles, polio, and whooping cough. The episode, aired on April 27, 2020 and produced and directed by John Palfreman, explores the views of these parents who feel vaccinations are a threat to their child and also the views of medical researchers and government agencies who work to placate the fears of nervous parents.
Those fears are what motivate parents not to vaccinate their children. Many parents hear stories of children who go in for vaccinations and soon after develop autism or other neurologic disabilities, and decide that vaccines should not be given to children. Government agencies and medical research centers have gone through study after study in an attempt to disprove the theory that vaccines cause autism, and so far,
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they have been successful. As the internet becomes more and more influential, articles relating stories of vaccines gone wrong are having a stronger effect on parents. Palfreman explores both sides of this argument in an attempt to keep parents fully informed on the subject of vaccine safety. The episode presents logical points in favor of both opinions.
For example, medical researchers argue that vaccines and autism are not linked, but rather the development of autism and other brain abnormalities simply occurs in the same period of a child’s life as their measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination. At the same time, it presents the point that these vaccinations include dangerous chemicals such as mercury and thimerosal which are extremely toxic. And while he strives to present both sides equally, it is clear that Palfreman favors the side of vaccinations. The majority of footage focuses on how medical research has disproven a link between autism and vaccines, while the parents are given small moments to share their opinions and experiences. The documentary paints a picture of parents who are simply paranoid and are ignoring one of medicine’s greatest innovations for unfounded reasons. In this way, the director shows bias in favor of medical opinion, rather than give equal representation of both
views. Of course, parents should be able to decide what kind of medical care to give their children, but this growing trend of allowing children to remain unvaccinated can have dire consequences for the community around them. It takes just one person to become infected for a disease to spread to those who either were not vaccinated themselves, or could not be vaccinated due to age or health. This debate is the main subject of the documentary as it explores the complexities of this issue. How can society expect a mother or father to risk giving their child an injection which could mentally disable them? But at the same time, how can one person decide they would rather risk bringing serious diseases back into the community that medical scientists have all but eliminated? All parents simply want to give their children the best life possible, whether it be through vaccinations or not. Obviously, parents want the option to choose what to inject into their children. But, could that decision negatively impact society as a whole? This debate will only continue to escalate and the solution proposed is to continue to hold medical studies until it is completely clear that there is no link between mental disabilities and vaccinations. The only real barrier to this solution is the fact that parents now tend to believe these studies to be inaccurate or fraudulent. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the future.
In the text, “Vaccines Cause Children More Adverse Reactions Than Any other Drug”, the author Dr. Mercola states his personal opinion as well as other doctors opinions are findings to help his research. The authors’ purpose is to inform the reader how vaccines are causing adverse reactions around the world. The author uses ethos throughout the piece because everyone he speaks with is a doctor, as well as him. His ethos makes the piece very informational and helpful to a parent reading who is concerned about vaccinating their kids. Dr. Mercola uses pathos by explaining all the harm vaccinations are doing, such as serious reactions and death. The piece has many logos informing readers’ studies being done on vaccinations, “based on reported pediatric
Despite all the testing and approval process of vaccines, many people still mistakenly believe that vaccines cause autism, even in light of research that has disproven the notion. This evidences the difficulty of dispelling false statements once someone has accepted a falsehood, especially if it has scientific research backing the results. It also highlights the gullibility of the public at large to believe anything that medical research reports without questioning the findings. Unfortunately, the media attention such examples of junk science receive aids in convincing many of its truthfulness. The hype surrounding the belief that vaccines cause autism began in 1998 when Andrew Wakefield in the UK published an article in the Lancet linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR...
In the Frontline episode The Vaccine War, a progressively distressful debate ensues among many scientists and doctors within the public health system and an unnerving alliance of parents, politicians, and celebrities. The topic of debate is the overwhelming pressure parents feel to vaccinate their children and their right to decline such vaccinations. In several American neighborhoods, groups of parents have been exercising their right to refuse vaccinations, which has elevated anxiety on the return of vaccine-preventable diseases such as pertussis and measles. The reason such parents are denying their children various vaccines such as the MMR “triple shot” for measles, mumps, and rubella is because they are convinced that it is linked to autism, a link that has yet to be proven. Many of these parents are focused solely on their children, not taking into account that their decision may put the American populace at risk for disease. Such parents are not thinking about other members of society that vaccines don’t work for, and in certain adolescents the effects deteriorate, thus only when every person is immunized the “heard immunity” is successful.
Edward Jenner invented a method to protect against smallpox in the late 1700s. The method involved taking substances from an open wound of someone with small-pox or cow-pox and injecting it into another person’s skin, also called “arm-to-arm inoculation”. The earliest actual documented examples of vaccination date all the way back to the tenth century in China (Lombard, “A brief history of vaccines and vaccinations”). The mention of early vaccination was taken note of by a French scholar, Henri Husson, written in one of his journals (Dictionaire des sciences médicale). The Ottoman Empire Turks also discovered a method of immunization a few centuries later. Lady Montagu of Great Britain, a famous writer and wife of the English ambassador of Istanbul, between 1716 -1718, came across the Turkish vaccine for small-pox. After surviving as a child with small-pox, she insisted her son be vaccinated (Henricy, “Letters of the Right Honourable Lady Wortley Montagu”). When she returned to England, she continued to publicize the Turkish tradition of immunization and spread their methods to the rest of her country. She also had all family members also vaccinated. Immunization was soon adopted in England, nearly 50 years before Jenner's smallpox vaccine in 1796 (Sharp, “Anti-vaccinationists past and present”). Edward Jenner’s target for smallpox was to eradicate it. And later by the 1940s, knowledge of the science behind vaccines had developed and soon reached the point where across-the-board vaccine production was a goal that was possible and where serious disease control efforts could start. Vaccines for many dangerous diseases, including ones protecting against pertussis, diphtheria, and tetanus were underway into production. ...
Parents everywhere ponder the question, what causes autism in young children? Since the early 1990s it has been debated whether or not vaccines are to blame for being the causal effect of autism. Numerous studies have been conducted to prove this theory true or false; however, many parents are still fighting the courts that vaccines caused autism in their children. Furthermore, more babies are not getting vaccinated due to the increasing scare being presented on the media about vaccines. The vaccine-autism controversy is the central issue in Jeffrey S. Gerber’s and Paul A. Offits’ article “Vaccines and Autism: A Tale of Shifting Hypotheses” as well as in Andy Coghlan’s article “Vaccines May Have Triggered Autism-Like Symptoms, US Court Rules.”
Despite the doctors’ reassurances and mounting evidences about the safety and value of immunization, many parents are still wary about getting their children injected. Some even opposed it because they fear that the vaccine itself is not benign. It is often considered unnecessary in many cases because the illnesses don’t pose a big threat to the child’s life. However, others point out that they help eradicate many contagious illnesses and prevent many deaths. For example, polio and smallpox, once killed thousands of children, are eliminated because of the use of vaccines. There were many studies conducting to show whether it can trigger serious reactions and disorders. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published an observation of 12 children that linked the measles, mumps, and rubella combination vaccine with intestinal problems which he believed led to autism. Once people heard this news, they become alarmed. However, many large studies had been conducted and found no association between the t...
There are many concerns about vaccines. Those concerns include, fears about contracting autism from vaccines, the small chance of contracting the disease from the vaccine, and not feeling vaccines are necessary anymore.
Vaccines have prompted some of the best public health triumphs continually, including the annihilation of smallpox from the globe and the close extermination of polio. They are the organisation of antigenic material to produce immunity to a disease, ameliorating the impacts of infection by a pathogen. The material administrated can either be live, yet debilitated types of pathogens such as bacteria or viruses, executed or inactivated, or refined material such as proteins. Little children are less resistant to diseases a couple of months after birth; it is therefore easier for them to become infected with a disease being passed around if they attend childcare with other children who might not be vaccinated. The Australian government should undoubtedly be able to prevent unvaccinated children from attending childcare centres; however, exceptions ought to be made for children unable to vaccinate due to undergoing treatment that compromises their immune system i.e. chemotherapy, or severe allergies to certain ingredients in vaccines.
There are also many cases where many parents strongly believe that some vaccines may have caused autism in their children. The reason being that many parents noticed shortly after their child was vaccinated they noticed symptoms like loss of language abilities and they suddenly stopped interacting with people. Also, the vaccines used to treat measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) are linked to many autism cases. Vaccines that contain thimerosal, an organic compound that contains mercury, have also been suspected to cause autism in children. Thimerosal has been removed from most vaccines because of its linkage to autism.
In recent years, the correlation between vaccines and autism has become the subject of much debate. On one side, there are the anti-vaccinators, or anti-vaccers. On the other, there’s pretty much everyone else. Despite the fact that the anti-vaccination movement has little base in scientific fact, their campaign to end early infanthood vaccinations rages on. While doctors and scientists try desperately to make parents look at the research studies, vaccination rates continue to fall. But, even in these dark times, there is still hope that scientific fact will prevail and defeat the anti-vaccination fear mongers who have caused many children to fall ill and even die because their parents did not properly vaccinate them. This is one of the most saddening scientific failures of the twenty-first century. A failure to educate the public properly has resulted in child, even infant, fatalities. The anti-vaccination movement was started based on falsified data and continues only because of a lack of knowledge and proper education of the general public.
How would you feel if your child was to catch a deadly disease at school from another student that had not been vaccinated. For many years, vaccinations have been forced unto babies and smaller children to help prevent a future epidemic such as the ones from many centuries ago. Later within the years after vaccinations seem to have been proven effective and slightly popular, they became mandatory for a student to be vaccinated before being able to enroll into a school. Most parents went along with the new rule ,but there were still many parents that strongly disagreed and felt that it violated their liberty to make decisions for their child 's lives. I personally believe that vaccinations should be forced among students for reason such as: combat deadly diseases, suppress
Vaccines against diphtheria, polio, pertussis, measles, mumps and rubella, and more recent additions of hepatitis B and chicken pox, have given humans powerful immune guards to ward off unwelcome sickness. And thanks to state laws that require vaccinations for kids enrolling in kindergarten, the U.S. presently enjoys the highest immunization rate ever at 77%. Yet bubbling beneath these national numbers is the question about vaccine safety. Driven by claims that vaccinations can be associated with autism, increasing number of parents are raising questions about whether vaccines are in fact harmful to children, instead of helpful (Park, 2008).
According to World Book Advanced Encyclopedia, immunization is defined as the process of protecting the body against disease by means of vaccines or serums (Hinman). While medical science backs up the efficiency and necessity of vaccines, within the past decade, a rise in parents disbelieving the medical community and neglecting to immunize their children has occurred. This “fear of vaccines” is nothing new, but with the ever-increasing safety of vaccines, the benefits of inoculation far outweigh the risks. Parents who refuse to vaccinate, or anti-vaxxers, put more than their children’s lives on the line, but also risk the safety of the whole community. Because vaccines are essential to protecting individuals and communities
Recently the number of parents who are intentionally delaying their children’s general vaccinations is increasing. The controversy that is causing the number of delayed vaccinations to go up is based on the fact that there are negative articles connecting them to autism and other similar diseases. When parents are researching vaccinations and they read those negative articles, those articles make them believe that vaccines cause autism. Vaccines are important because they protect humans from preventable diseases and getting them could save human lives. Vaccines are important throughout life no matter what some research suggests. Parents are now more likely to intentionally delay vaccines because of negative press, even though vaccines
For innumerable centuries, unrelenting strains of disease have ravaged society. From the polio epidemic in the twentieth century to the measles cases in the latter half of the century, such an adverse component of nature has taken the lives of many. In 1796, Edward Jenner discovered that exposure to cowpox could foster immunity against smallpox; through injecting the cowpox into another person’s arm, he founded the revolutionary concept known as a vaccination. While many attribute the eradication of various diseases to vaccines, many United States citizens are progressively beginning to oppose them. Many deludedly thought that Measles had been completely terminated throughout the United States; however, many children have been patronized by