The Pros And Cons Of Vaccinating Children

Everyone wants what is best for their children, and for this reason and many others a lot of parents in recent decades have been choosing to not vaccinate their children. There are many reasons that parents may or may not choose to vaccinate their children, each of these arguments has plenty of reasons for and against them. There are three prominent reasons in the anti-vaccination community on why vaccinations are looked down upon or seen as dangerous. The first of these being that many believe vaccinations to cause developmental disabilities, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder, as well as physical disabilities. The second main reason is that many of these same people also believe that there are dangerous and untested chemicals with unknown consequences

The MMR vaccine is the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and is given around the time of a child’s first birthday. Many parents worry that the child’s body is too weak or immature to handle the vaccine, but this has been proven false and there is overwhelming evidence that vaccinating at a young age can help the child’s health for the rest of their life. The journal that this claim was published in later pulled the article and the author was sued for conflict of interest and other reasons (historyofvaccines.org). Even though this claim has been disputed numerous times in studies since the claim was made, many parents still cling to the argument that vaccines do indeed cause autism and refuse to vaccinate their children because of a fear of the developmental disorder. Researcher Susan Mayor documented a case study performer in the United Kingdom. 1,294 born in or later than 1973 who had a developmental disorder were recorded between 1987 and 2001. Results showed that 78% of people who were diagnosed with a developmental disorder had been given the MMR vaccine, 82% of the control group (without a disorder) had also been given the vaccine (Mayor). These results show that the MMR vaccine did not cause a severe developmental disability in the participants. Mayor stated that “The odds ratio for association between having the MMR vaccine and having a pervasive developmental disorder as 0.86%, indicating no relationship”. The article goes on to discuss

A widely accepted argument is that there are unknown and untested ingredients in vaccines and that the effects of these can not be known, who would want to subject their child to be a science experiment? Several studies have tested the amounts of these alleged chemicals, most often the subject of concern are thimerosal and mercury. It has been found, however, that these chemicals are used as preservatives in the vaccine and present in such miniscule amounts that they pose no danger. Chemicals like formaldehyde and aluminum are often referenced as being dangerous chemicals found in vaccines, but these chemicals are found naturally in the human body and are not toxic in the amounts present in vaccines (Kata). In Anna Kata’s article “Anti-Vaccine Activists, Web 2.0, and the Postmodern Paradigm” she writes about how after the claim that vaccines cause autism was disproven, many people who supported the anti-vaccination movement moved on to blame chemicals such as thimerosal and mercury as what was making their children “sick” or why vaccines were harmful. These chemicals were reduced as components in vaccines and a drop in autism was expected by 2006, but when there was no change in autism rates the date was pushed back to 2011, when rates were still the same. When people realized that reducing the amounts of these chemicals in vaccines, which