Anti Vaccination Controversy

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Pages: 6

The article The Impact of the Anti-Vaccination Movement and Vaccine Hesitancy on the Health of the Child written by nurses Janet Green, Julia Petty, Lisa Whiting, Fiona Orr, Karen Walker, and Ann Marie Brown is an informative article written from a scientific perspective. It is written to bring awareness to the anti-vaccination movement, the dangers of misinformation and conspiracy theories, the causes of vaccine hesitancy, and the implications anti-vaccination has on the health of children and the risks it presents to vulnerable populations. Throughout the article, they frequently cite sources that they have derived their information from to back up their claims. The science of vaccinations is thorough and accurate, however, the confidence …show more content…
They want confidence to be restored in a preventative measure that has saved millions of lives over the past couple hundred years. The authors discuss the science behind vaccinations and its importance when it comes to children. They inform the reader that children have inherently weak immune systems and that the only way they mature is through exposure to illness or vaccination. This displays the key importance of childhood vaccines: they protect the young, immature immune system that is vulnerable to many different bacterial/viral infections. The main content of the article discusses anti-vaccination, commonly known as anti-vax. This belief has been prevalent ever since the first use of vaccines, the smallpox vaccine. The belief has been the same ever since: the safety of vaccines is not proven. In the past, opposition to vaccines used the press to persuade people and fill their minds with myths and hoaxes about the dangers of vaccines. In the present, social media and the internet have done a much more efficient job of spreading misinformation and fear surrounding …show more content…
There is a substantial amount of information available online, and a lot of it is inaccurate or deceptive. Anti-vaccine individuals take advantage of the susceptibility of misinformation to push their agenda. When it comes to misinformation, the leading cause of this hysteria is conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theorists have been most prevalent about the Covid-19 vaccine. They believe that COVID-19 was artificially created to force people into taking a vaccine that infiltrates and alters the body’s DNA. They believe that the government has inflated the death toll to make people believe there is a need to take a vaccine with dangerous side effects. In reality, though, these all have been proven false. The vaccine for COVID-19 does not even enter the nucleus of the cell. However, with social media being a breeding ground for radicals and fanatics, this idea is still very much prevalent. The reason why social media is so dangerous is because the sheer amount of users makes it the go-to source of information for many during health crises. The World Economic Forum has described misinformation on social media as a great threat to society, and it