Anti Vaccination Movement

Since the creation of vaccinations, many lives have been prolonged, and the risk of contracting an infectious disease has been minimized. Vaccines are meant to trick the body into believing they have already had the disease and then to create antibodies that later help prevent contracting the disease (“How Vaccines Stop Diseases like Measles”). When enough people have vaccines, it contributes to a herd immunity, which can prevent widespread outbreaks and make it safer for people who are unable to vaccinate, such as people with allergies (“How Vaccines Stop Diseases like Measles”). Vaccinations have major impacts on the health of individuals and influence the low rates of infectious disease outbreaks. Since the early 2000s, parents have started …show more content…
As a result of this speculation surrounding the MMR vaccine, it led to the Anti-Vaccination movement that started in the early 2000s. The anti-vaccination movement started as a league of parents who started boycotting vaccines altogether because of their potential dangers to the development of autism and other developmental issues that would later arise. The media contributes to the increasing amounts of parent’s refusals of vaccines because of the publicity of the Anti-Vaccine movement, but the parents lack knowledge about the information they are attempting to argue. Wakefield studied 8 children whose first symptoms of autism appeared within one month of receiving the MMR vaccine (Plotkin 456). Wakefield believed that the MMR vaccine was dangerous and is what led to the increases in autism (Plotkin 456). Therefore, contributing to the increasing number of people questioning the safety of vaccines. In Plotkin’s scholarly journal “Vaccines and Autism: A Tale of Shifting Hypotheses,” he claims that many concerns about the MMR vaccine during the speculation of the vaccine’s relationship to autism were that the mixture “causes autism by damaging the intestinal lining, allowing entrance of encephalopathic proteins” into the bloodstream and then travels to the brain (Plotkin 456). Another problem surrounding the MMR vaccine was “thimerosal, an ethyl mercury-containing preservative in some vaccines, [which] is toxic to the central nervous system” (Plotkin 456). Lastly, another problem associated with the link between the MMR vaccine and autism was that “multiple vaccines at [the] same time overwhelms or weakens [the] immune system” causing the child’s body to be more susceptible to developing autism or other developmental problems (Plotkin 456). Later studies determined that after

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