Anti-Vaccination movement puts all students at risk – A student report

By Henry Yasho
Amelia Island Montessori School
8th Grade
June 15, 2019  9:00 a.m.

Editor’s Note: Karl Schlobohm’s Eighth Grade students at Amelia Island Montessori School were given an assignment to write on a subject of interest to them. We will post a series of the student’s class assignments over this Father’s Day weekend. We hope you enjoy.

Anti-Vaccination Movement Puts all Students at Risk

From Vaccines.gov;

• Basics Understanding the difference between vaccines, vaccinations, and immunizations can be tricky. Below is an easy guide that explains how these terms are used:
• A vaccine is a product that produces immunity from a disease and can be administered through needle injections, by mouth, or by aerosol.
• A vaccination is the injection of a killed or weakened organism that produces immunity in the body against that organism. An immunization is the process by which a person or animal becomes protected from a disease. Vaccines cause immunization, and there are also some diseases that cause immunization after an individual recovers from the disease.

As a current middle school student, the Anti-Vaccination Movement directly affects me and all of the people around me. While current regulations protect our population by requiring students to maintain medical records, physicals and vaccinations, many students and families slip through the cracks by claiming exemption through their religious beliefs. With these kinds of loopholes in place, it is impossible for any student to avoid potential exposure to very serious and sometimes deadly contagious diseases. This is especially concerning, when you picture the reality of sitting a classroom with at least 20 children at a time every day. This is especially concerning, because diseases such as measles and smallpox were nearly eradicated, and now our population at the highest risk of contamination vaccines for these diseases were developed.

Vaccines are a modern medicine first developed by Edward Jenner in the year 1796, who figured out that if he implanted a weakened version of the Cowpox disease into a host, it would prevent them from getting the much more deadly Smallpox disease. Jenner developed this method when his milkmaids, who were previously sick with Cowpox, had never caught Smallpox. The method to harvest and implant the disease however was not as clean as today’s methods. The method in question was done by taking a person who carries Cowpox, extracting material from the infected skin, which was usually a blister, and putting it into the recipientś arm.

Today, the issue of vaccines is one of the most controversial problems our generation due to a large portion of our society who believe that vaccines do more harm than good. The most popular beliefs among so-called ¨anti-vax¨ movements is that vaccines contain a lot of unsafe or toxic chemicals, such as: mercury, formaldehyde, and aluminum, and that they cause autism. I have chosen these two arguments because they are used very commonly among the anti-vax community. First of all, autism is a condition developed in the womb from abnormalities in the brain structure or function, though some have also developed the condition through toxic chemical exposure during late brain growth while still in the womb it is impossible to acquire autism later in life. Second of all, though most vaccines do contain trace amounts of mercury, aluminum, and formaldehyde though they are all completely safe. The mercury in these vaccines is actually a compound called Thimerosal, which is used as a preservative and has even been taken out of a lot of vaccines because people feared they’d get mercury poison. While the aluminum and formaldehyde is actually a smaller dosage than your body regularly produces every day. Even though these lies have been debunked many times new ones keep popping up as older ones disappear. Over 3 million people died last year alone from easily preventable diseases, about half of those being children under the age of 5, and most of these diseases are highly infectious so unvaccinated children were also transmitting the disease to other people as well.

The risks of vaccines are very small compared to benefits, but ¨anti-vax¨ parents still seem to believe that their choice is always the right choice. Sometimes a parent can be wrong, and that’s okay, but when it affects the quality of life to that child, they need to know when to step back and let professionals interfere. It is unbelievable that, in this day and age, parents still don’t think these diseases are deadly enough to outweigh the ¨consequences¨ of vaccinating.