Vaccines Are Necessary Essay

Vaccines: Necessary or Useless?

Vaccines are not fun. Getting poked with a needle is not exactly considered ideal. I know I never liked getting vaccinated. When I was a baby, I would scream and kick and beg the nurse not to give me a shot. I hated needles and I hated shots. I have outgrown my fear now, but I still do not want to get poked with a needle every day. Despite my hatred of needles as a young girl, I still received every vaccine that my doctor recommended. And guess what? I have never gotten polio, measles, whooping cough, mumps, rubella, and other diseases that have killed millions of people in the past. Even though I hated it, they still helped me in the long run. So no, vaccines are not fun, but they are necessary. The benefits

Believe it or not, but investing money in vaccines actually helps our economy. When a person thinks about it, it makes sense. For every vaccine you receive, the less likely you will have to pay medical expenses if you get sick. And that money adds up, “Every $1 invested in immunization returns an estimated $16 in health-care savings and increased economic productivity” (Bustreo par. 4). Using those statistics, every ten dollars a person spends on getting a flu vaccine potentially saves them one hundred-sixty dollars from doctor visits. Imagine what that could do in third world countries where hundreds of people are dying everyday from vaccine-preventable diseases. Imagine how quickly that money could add up. Not only would it save their citizens’ lives, it would actually help their economy

Most of this has to do with the myths circulating around vaccines, mainly the one that ties vaccines to autism. In 1998, an author wrote a research paper called The Lancelot. In The Lancelot, “Andrew Wakefield, a British researcher at the time, linked the MMR vaccine with autism spectrum disorders in the paper” (Bushak par. 22). This paper created a huge stir within parents and caused a decrease in vaccines despite the fact that “later, the paper was found to be fraudulent, and it emerged that Wakefield had been funded by opponents of vaccine manufacturers” (Bushak par. 22). The paper surfaced years later, and now there are organizations built on anti-vaccination ideologies around this paper despite the fact that it has been proven wrong several