The first article I ever wrote for this paper was about the necessity of vaccines and the problems with the anti-vaccination movement. Sadly, although it has been two years since then, it’s still necessary to address the subject now and again, since the number of parents refusing to vaccinate their kids in this country is rising. Additionally, more parents who actually are vaccinating are turning to “alternative scheduling,” a practice that spreads out vaccination over a longer period of time than the traditional schedule does in an attempt to avoid “chemical overload.”
I’m not going to argue about whether vaccines cause autism. They don’t. The American Academy of Pediatrics released a 21-page list of the various studies that have found, over and over again, that there is no connection between vaccines and autism — to informed people, that argument is over.
I’m not going to argue about whether and how you should vaccinate your kids. You should, both so they won’t get sick and so other people’s kids won’t get sick. That’s what vaccines are intended to do, and they have largely been successful, preventing millions of diseases and possible deaths and eradicating or all but eradicating diseases like smallpox, polio, measles and whooping cough. And you should do it on the traditional schedule, so that disease can’t take advantage of the gaps in your child’s vaccination schedule. On this subject, I’m taking doctors’ words for it, because I figure they almost always know better than I do on medical subjects.
Instead, let’s discuss a solution.
First we need to address the question of why parents aren’t vaccinating their kids. The answer used to be that long-debunked autism myth, but last year a study found that 73 percent of parents who refused or delayed vaccination did so because they think that vaccines are “unnecessary.”
I think that that attitude can largely be attributed to the good vaccines have done. We’re just not scared anymore. Parents aren’t worried that their kid is going to get polio and lose their ability to walk because it hasn’t happened to anyone they know. Diseases that children used to get and die of in the bad old days have largely been kicked into line by rigorous vaccination practices in countries like America, and people growing into the age where they’re ready to have kids and make bad decisions about their health have just never experienced what a world where fewer people are vaccinated looks like. Having a child die these days is a rare tragedy, where 100 years ago nearly 1 child of every 10 would die before their fourth birthday.
Vaccines are tremendously valuable to our national health and our overall feeling of security — they’re so good at what they do that we’ve started taking them for granted. But Americans are incredibly fortunate to have the access to them that we do. One in every 10 children worldwide isn’t so lucky as to be able to just throw away this protection — they live in warzones and in areas undergoing humanitarian crises and would probably love to be safe from diseases that people living here don’t even have to think about.
Anti-vaxxers in the U.S. are acting up, trying to block legislation that would provide vaccination information to parents, require vaccination or even allow doctors to vaccinate children who have not yet been adopted. And we’re not alone — France, where 41 percent of people believe vaccines are unsafe, is having a similar problem with declining vaccination rates. Their solution is one we should examine.
They’re requiring vaccines. (Already I’ve lost any hardcore libertarians.)
The U.S. requires vaccines too, of course — but many states provide exemptions for personal beliefs, and anti-vaxxers are taking advantage of those exemptions. As much as I know how many people hate the government requiring them to do anything, in this case, a stricter requirement — one that eliminates personal belief exemptions while keeping medical exemptions — is necessary to prevent us from returning to the days of not being sure your kid would live to be 5.
As much as we may hate the government restricting any freedom, we all accept some reasonable limitations because we have to keep trucking along as a civilized society — the vast majority of us understand that stop signs and seatbelt laws keep us safe on the road, even if they do require us to do something we might not want to do.
We’ve already stopped letting people decide that it’s okay if their baby gets thrown through the windshield in the event of a crash. It seems like a no-brainer to stop letting them decide they’re okay with their baby dying of diphtheria.