Recently the topic of mandatory vaccinations has been publicized due to an outbreak of measles stemming from Disneyland. Parents currently have some rights to deny having their children receiving childhood vaccinations, but are these parents really helping them or just posing a risk to the child and a nation. Parents find many different arguments to exempt their children from vaccinations, such as childhood vaccines causing autism, or that vaccines are not safe, but how true are these arguments? Many parents fear that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine could cause their child to have the developmental disorder known as autism. These parents’ fears may have initially been sparked and fueled by a study conducted in 1998 that claimed …show more content…
One who does not receive their vaccines hurts the common idea of herd or community immunity. The principal of community or herd immunity is that unimmunized persons are passively protected by those who are immunized around them. Many people will then argue then if a child is not immunized they are protected but that is not the case. Diseases have a threshold percent of people that need to be immune to the disease for the idea of community immunity to work effectively. For a person to be immune to a disease they need to have had the vaccination or they would have had to previously contract the disease. This is where the unimmunized people come in; there are some unimmunized people who have chosen not to be vaccinated, but there are other unimmunized people who do not get the option to get vaccinated. The people who do not get to choose to be vaccinated are those who are immunocompromised ("Community Immunity", 2014). Immunocompromised people are those whose immune system cannot fight off infections as well as a healthy persons whether it be because of a medical condition, or a drug used to treat a condition. If an immunocompromised person were to contract a disease it is highly likely that the person would succumb to the disease. These are the people who are to be protected by the idea of community immunity. If one child gets the disease and goes into the hospital they have the potential to spread the disease to a child who does not have the immune system to fight the disease. This is why all healthy children need to be